My Little Pony XCV: I am (Finally) Become Pancakes!

[DigoDragon]

but rather a product of another session of super procrastination.

Ah, procrastination. The gift that pays off immediately.

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Content Warning: Contains AU world-building based on FiM (which serve as the fluff for all my Minecraft projects).

Wow, that looks pretty sizable. How well can you defend yourself from monsters in these places? Pretty well I imagine.

(a.k.a. "Equestria-3")

Equestria-3? What happened to Equestria-2?

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Oh, right. Luna dang it, Glimmer.

Speaking of said celestial, I seem to remember that she was trying to redeem you or something? What would that even look like?

Pain, I imagine.

[digiman619]

Equestria-3? What happened to Equestria-2?

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Oh, right. Luna dang it, Glimmer.

It's a reference to Earth-3. the alternate reality in DC Comics where all the superheroes were villains and vice versa. Though don't worry too much about Equestria-2. It's where Littlepip lives.

Fun fact: Earth-11 is the genderbent universe, so let's take a look at Equestria-11!

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[Aotrs Commander]

Speaking of said celestial, I seem to remember that she was trying to redeem you or something? What would that even look like?

Your guess is probably better than mine.

But given it appears to involve drilling non-regenerateably cursed holes in me, I thing Digo might have the right of it.

She might just be completely bonkers and I don't mean in An Hilarious Pinkie Pie (or even Starlight) fashion...

[t209]

Equestria-3? What happened to Equestria-2?

Well...I think it got erased by Barry Allen...I mean Dr. Manhattan or Dan Didio after Flashpoint.

[Aotrs Commander]

Botty-Pain's birthday part today, so Twilight Sparkle and Luna Invictus were handed over with due cerimony and unwrapped. (Twlight recieved an immediate mouth-insertion, and he was at least as amused by the boxes, so win-win).



I finished the Revenant Spear. And of course it took far longer than it should because TurboCAD. And then ages trying to get the lightning to co-operate to give me a passable render picture...

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And then spent way too much time faffing with Pokémon and not realising until way way way too late that when I accidently let that Snivy evolve it ws going to mean it effectively made it useless for breeding because it dropped the egg chance down so far. Still, living dex is much closer to completion now, with only, like three Pokémon left...

[zimmerwald1915]

(Twlight recieved an immediate mouth-insertion, and he was at least as amused by the boxes, so win-win).

Whence the wrapping paper?

[meto30]

Ah, procrastination. The gift that pays off immediately.

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Wow, that looks pretty sizable. How well can you defend yourself from monsters in these places? Pretty well I imagine.

With a long, flimsy fence and countless torches, mostly. It doesn't take a lot of skill to defend yourself in Minecraft, just a lot of resources. That and CONSTANT VIGILANCE against Creepers; a split-second reaction to hissing sounds and green colouration.

P.S. Also, punctual use of the bed as soon as possible each night so that the night time does not last as long. Identifying and blocking off cave entrances nearby before starting work is also a prudent step.

[Aotrs Commander]

Whence the wrapping paper?

Immediately torn off. He knows that much, at least! (But it Was only Christmas a few weeks ago.) It was paper off, mummy opens box,yanks Twiloight out, straight into mouth...! So, yeah, he wasn't that bothered in playing with the wrapping paper itself (perhaps surprisingly) - though he did try to crawl into the open box before mummy put it all away. (He was a bit tired, it had been a long party and they were going to open most of the rest of the presents later, but I wanted to see him open mine (especially since I wasn't able to go up on his birthday, since Mum had double-booked and Dad had the other car (and can't Gate because regs)).

[DigoDragon]

It doesn't take a lot of skill to defend yourself in Minecraft, just a lot of resources.

So basically be like Applejack.

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[Pendulous]

Allegories

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[DigoDragon]

Allegories

Pffft, that last part. XD

10/10

[Excession]

I'm down. Trixie as a "Wingmare"? This can't possibly go wrong. :D


Wish it were colder. Weather is like 8-9 degrees above our norm. You can't enjoy some hot Coco in warm weather, you know?

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Hot winters depress me.

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The weather forecast down here for this week includes the phrases "combination of significant weather features" and "explosive cyclogenesis". It's going to be a "fun" few days.

Spoiler: Stormy Pony

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[Tiki Snakes]

It's been a long day and I'm out of it at this late hour, mildly delirious due to the proximity of sleep, hovering over my mind like a vulture. When I'm like this, sometimes my mind wanders to old places, I get reflective. Start thinking about events long past or places long abandoned or lost.

Since I last posted around here, a lot of things haven't changed. My love for pony never grew back. I never came back to the show, I never watched another episode in fact. With that loss goes any chance of me ever finishing the "Dark Sun Ponies" setting project I had been tinkering with. It's just not going to happen. No passion for the underlying subject and no understanding of how the franchise has evolved in the intervening time (nor even the interest in finding out).

But I had completed a couple more bits since I last posted any kind of actual write-up. Not much and it's been so long since I even looked at the folder I have no idea what I've even written. I could make an argument that what I should have done is continue not thinking about all this, or simply deleted the whole folder and be done with it. As it stands, computer instability means that there's a chance that choice could be made for me at some point, so what I'm going to do instead is dump everything I have in the folder here in a big spoiler.

And then forget about it.

Spoiler: Dark Sun Pony Dump part 1

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Spoiler: history.odt

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History of the World as it is.


The sun rises over the wasteland every morning huge and dark and full of burning hate. It bakes the broken land as if to choke the last vestiges of life from it just as the moon seems to smother the land with freezing cold indifference. The wasteland is a hostile place where the weather, flora and fauna are all out to get you and the gentle civilisations of the past are long forgotten legends. Those few fragments of civilisation that remain are harsh, brutal and pragmatic. Mad cities ruled by insane ancient ponies of terrible power, deified by their cowering underlings. The Sorcerer Queens hide in their city states and brood, matching each others schemes in an uneasy status-quo. The common folk grind out a living in the bloodthirsty broken world, the only one they ever knew or will know. Those lucky enough to gain the favour of their tyrannical rulers may be fortunate enough to rise to positions of relative wealth and comfort but the rest must fight for survival on a daily basis in a world where only the strong survive.

The remaining cities of the wasteland stand alone. Sometimes they will rouse themselves to war against the other, but the games the Sorcerer Queens play have long since reached stalemate and few of those involved are willing to risk everything to disturb it. Trade flourishes as best it can when simply getting from one city to the next constitutes an oddyssy rich with danger and the promise of a grim and lonely death. Slavery is ubiquitous, Gladiators fight to the death for the entertainment of the masses and the only laws that remain are whatever the local Sorcerer Queen chooses to enforce.

No one knows how things came to be this way, save perhaps the Sorcerer Queens themselves. Aeons have passed without number and what little history as has been passed down states only that it has always been this way. The Sorcerer Queens rule the cities, fearing nopony except each other and the dreaded Draconequus who ventures forth from his hidden fortress deep in the most inhospitable wastes to demand his tithe of 1000 slaves once a year.

Rumours persist that once upon a time, the Sorcerer Queens served a master more mighty than themselves, a grand Queen who ruled the skies themselves. Under the Sun-Queen, the rumours say, the Sorcerer Queens purged the world of races deemed unclean and in the process destroyed the world, boiled the oceans and withered the forests. The horrors of the present day date back to that terrible war perhaps and the horrible scars inflicted on the world by the nightmare of Defiling, a form of magic that grants terrible power at great cost to the world around the practicioner. Some few ponies stand against all of this in secret, working wherever they can to preserve what remains of the world and to oppose the Sorcerer Queens and their agents. They must work quietly and carefully for their foes are far more powerful than them, but they are held together by a stubborn faith in there being a better way, higher values to cleave to that could have saved the world had they been upheld. Rumours abound of these secretive Preservers defending above all else a certain mysterious grove of crystal trees, hidden somewhere away from prying eyes by powerful mystic forces.

Such stories have little traction amongst the common folk. The Sorcerer Queens are unassaiable and the world unfixable. It is a struggle simply to survive and to keep one's family safe in this land of tyrants and terrors.



History of the World as it was.


Celestia was a pony of astonishing power and cunning. An Alicorn from the earliest days of the world when the sun was small and bright and the land was green and idyllic. Her people ruled the land in peace and wisdom all was as it should be. In time, new races began to emerge and grow in prominance, even as her own majestic kin waned and became rare. Eventually, the Pony races we are more familiar with inherited the aging world and the resentment growing in Celestia's heart took hold and became a plan. She would return the world to it's youth and hand it to the one race that most deserved it, an ancient race that although fallen from it's earliest days as the servants of the Alicorns was at least in her eyes the most pure as they remained largely unchanged from the dawn times.

She saught out pupils and used the might of her people to raise them up into champions. The first became as a sister to her and together they drove the mighty Draconequus race to apparent extinction. Between them they trained two more, raising these new pupils above their peers and filling their heads with arcane lore and the secrets of defiling, a magical technique that allowed her pupils to weild far greater levels of power than they were otherwise capable of comprehending. She taught them the ideals of Harmony, a warped philosophy designed to lead them into inevitable conflict with other races so that when it came to war they would pursue it totally and believe it to be both their own choice and a moral necessity.

And so things came to pass. The secretive changelings were driven into hiding by her second student and her third drove the Sea Ponies into the deepest parts of the oceans. The second founded an empire on the teachings of his mistress, enslaving conquered peoples to properly serve him and spread his influence. He also studied deeply and this proved to be his undoing. As much as he was able to swell his magical knowledge, he also deduced the true end-goal of Celestia's plan and so Celestia and Luna destroyed him and in his death-throes he cast his spirit and his capitol city into shadowy voids far away from their influence.

Her third student became a master of the arcane in his own right, but his hubris knew no bounds and he proved to be his own doom. He transformed himself and his closest allies into a magical tree whilst trying to forge a new form of magic to rival Defiling. Celestia would in turn sieze the essance of this tree in order to defeat the one surviving Draconequus, before going on to become ruler of the nation of Equestria. This gave her the time and opportunity to engineer a society such that it would create more reliable and maluable students. When her first student attempted to sieze power, she banished her to the moon and redoubled on her goal of socially engineering a new class of more suitable champions.

A thousand years passed and Celestia's new class of champions grew slowly into their burgeoning magical powers. One was manipulated into facing the returning first student, Luna. Though Celestia's manipulations succeeded, Twilight Sparkle defeated her in a way Celestia hadn't forseen, not alone but with the aid of her friends and the magical artifacts created from the crystal tree that was the tomb of Starswirl the Bearded and his cadre. With Luna brought back into the fold, cowed and humble, Celestia accelerated her plans and her student was brought into conflict with various factions as she grew towards achieving her magical transformation into a fully fledged Alicorn like Cadence before her.


In the years that followed, an apparent golden age begun only to increasingly tarnish as threats from outside Equestria seemed to move to ruin it at any cost. Wars broke out between the various Champions of Equestria and the dark forces and alien races that Celestia so carefully manipulated into their way. These became known as the Wars of Harmony, or the Crusades of Harmonisation.

Each one seemed unconnected, but eventually the pony race appeared to be beset on all sides by foes. Some saught to bring swift and merciful ends to the wars by Diplomacy or targetted strikes but other Champions embraced the growing call for Total War and saught the goal of extermination with increasing vigor. They would establish Ponykind as the one true inheritors of Equestria, of the world itself and they would rule it from palaces of gold and silver.

But once again, Celestia's plans were revealed to her brightest and most faithful of students. When Celestia gave Discord, (whom she had kept in order to study) to Fluttershy the intended lesson for Twilight was that some people can not be reformed and that Kindness will sometimes destroy you. When Fluttershy actually succeeded this represented a problem and so eventually Celestia arranged for Discord's death to be necessary, allowing the Draconequus to realise just how fully Pony Society was rejecting the message of his first true friend and baiting him into a rampage. Celestia stepped in before Twilight and her friends could deal with the situation, killing him outright.

In the aftermath of this, Twilight Sparkle pieced together the implications and the manipulations that had led to war and halted her campaign of harmonisation in secret. Decades passed as she worked to find a way to halt the slaughter before it was too late. She pursued the research of Starswirl the Bearded in earnest, seaking any way to oppose Celestia directly but although her powers grew exponentially, she knew she was still no match for her. As the Wars of Harmony inevitably turned pony against pony she lobbied the other Champions carefully, allowing them to come to realise the truth without exposing herself and risking everything.

This careful, desperate process was interupted when Princess Luna revealed that she knew Celestia's end-game and simply didn't care. She had betrayed her mentor and suffered because of it, better to serve dutifully than to risk her wrath even if it meant the eventual extermination of the Pony Race. Twilight slew her in battle before she could warn Celestia and the forces she had rallied moved to confront their mistress. Their attack was sudden and overwhelming, it had to be because they could not have withstood a counter-attack from one so powerful. They banished Celestia to the sun and Blueblood volunteered to do what was needed to create and maintain the seal in perpetuity.

Drained by the battle and overwhelmed by the side-effects of the energies wielded, Twilight was unable to intervene when the process triggered a transformation in Blueblood. He mutated out of control, the energies he was containing turning him into a Draconequus. He stood tall and powerful, wielding the same reality-altering powers that had made the Draconequus people such a threat once upon a time. And then something came over him, he shifted and was no longer Blueblood but instead Discord himself, enraged by his betrayal and the world abandoning the principles of Kindness and Friendship. The mad draconequus fled into the world leaving a wake of chaos and devesation in his wake, defiling the world as he went in search of terrible vengeance.

Twilight Spark and her friends, spent by the battle and the effort to seal away the omnicidal Alicorn returned to the Everfree Forest and the Tree of Harmony, their limbs becoming stiff and their minds becoming distant and slow. As the world burned, they completed the transformation they had begun long ago as they mastered the magic of friendship and before long the Tree of Harmony was joined by a grove of similar crystal trees, there roots digging deep into the Equestrian soil. There victory over Celestia had been a deeply phyrric one and as their awarenesses waned and became difuse, the world burned in sorcerous fire.

It took a decade for Blueblood to regain control of his body and by that time the world was as we know it today. Blasted, burned and broken. What life hadn't been twisted and mutated by the Champions during the War of Harmony was now dead or twisted into hideous monstrous versions of it's former self and those races that remained had to find ways to survive in the hellscape left behind. The Champions abandoned their campaigns and retired to their city-states to rule what was left, becoming known collectively in time as the Sorcerer Queens.


Sorcerer Queens
1. Luna [dream'd] - Destroyer of Draconequi,(Harmonisation 365 years, successful) Archenemy of Apes (Harmonisation 40 years, successful), Saddle-Arabian-Slaughterer (Harmonisation 110 years, complete) Minotaur Menace (Harmonisation 231 years, incomplete). Banished to the Moon by Celestia after a failed coup. Remained loyal after being freed, killed to prevent her warning Celestia of the attempt to banish her to the Sun, interrupting her successful campaign against the Minotaur. Dead....mostly.

2. Sombra [Double Dead] - Scourge of the Changelings. Harmonisation 125 years, unsuccessful. Killed by Celestia by Celestia and Luna after figuring out Celestia's ultimate goal. Killed again by Cadence during his attempted resurrection. Very, Very dead.

3. Star Swirl the Bearded [Tree'd] Bane of the Sea Ponies Harmonisation lasted about 300 years before Star Swirl got pre-occupied with arcane studies. Unsuccessful. Believed he had discovered a more powerful form of magic based on Friendship, believing it to be capable of giving him the potential to challenge Celestia for dominance. Screwed up a transformation ritual involving a group of his closest allies and became a tree. Essence of Star Swirl and Friends removed from the tree by Celestia in order to defeat Discord.

4. Cadence [Alive]- Bane of Changelings. Harmonisation 450 years, unsuccessful. See Crystal Empire.

5. Twilight Sparkle [Tree'd] - Scourge of the Bat-Ponies. Harmonisation lasted 113 years before being secretly discontinued. Incomplete. Bulwark of Equestria. Became a Tree.

6. Blue Blood [Alive]- Crusher of Camels, (Harmonisation 260 years, successful.) Flayer of Foxes (Harmonisation 145 years, incomplete), Zebra End, Harmonisation 300 years, mostly successful. Volunteered to become The Draconequus in order to seal "Aunty Celestia" in the Sun. Turned into Discord and ravished Equestria for a decade before regaining his own mind. Demands a yearly tithe of 1000 slaves from the other Sorcerer Queens, supposedly to maintain the seal.

7. Trixie [Alive]- Bane of the Breezies. Harmonisation 3 days, complete. Bane of the Sky Beasts, harmonisation 790 years, utter failure.

8. Flim [Alive]- Bane of Giraffes, harmonisation 347 years, Completed with assistance of his brother Flam. See the Free Cities.

9. Flam [Alive]- Bane of Lamas, Harmonisation 347 years, Completed with assistance of his brother Flim. See the Free Cities.

10. Sunset Shimmer [Dead]- Slayer of Dragons, Harmonisation 750 years, Successful. Killed by Twilight Sparkle for attacking Spike, the last Dragon. Dead.

11. Photo Finish? [Alive]- Deer-molisher, Harmonisation lasted 297 years, Successful.

12. Lightning Dust? [Dead] Griffin Curse, Harmonisation 450 years, mostly successful. Stabbed 32 times in the chest by Lyra, for interrupting her studies. (This kills people).

13. Diamond Tiara [Dead]- Donkey-Doom. Harmonisation 698 years, unsuccessful. Stayed loyal to Celestia, Slain by Blueblood.

14. Derpy? [Alive]- Phoenix Plucker, Harmonisation 25 years, successful. Scourge of the Sea Ponies, Harmonisation 20 years, incomplete. Got lost and went missing for several years during campaign against the sea ponies, was unable to explain how. Assisted various Sorcerer Queens, 420 years, mostly unsuccessful. Earth Pony Doom, Harmonisation 25 years alongside Lyra. Unsuccessful.

15. Maud Pie [Alive]- Buffalo Breaker, Harmonisation 131 years, successful. Pegasus Punisher, Harmonisation 250 years, unsuccessful. See Karst.

16. Lyra [Alive]- Cloud Breaker, Bane of the Pegasi. 75 years, unsuccessful. Earth Shaker, harrier of the Earth Pony. Harmonisation 400 years. 25 alongside Derpy. Unsuccessful. Subjugated a large proportion of the rebellious Earth Pony population, forced the Pegasi to abandon their cloud-homes by repeatedly using defiling magic to destroy their cloud-cities during night-time ambushes. Killed Lightning Dust and ate her hooves.

Spoiler: Races.odt

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Races

I'm honestly not sure what kind of music says Dark Sun for me. I actually find this is a little bit of a problem, as I usually use music to get my mind in the right place for most things.

Oh well, let's collect some Dark Sun race-thoughts. That should be easy enough.

Spoiler: Unicorns

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Most prevalent pony race, especially in the cities of the Sorcerer Queens. Templars of the various Queens tend to be Unicorn and the elite of a city will usually show a noticeable unicorn-bias to one degree or another. However, they are just as prevalent in the slums as anywhere else and meaningful numbers find themselves in even worse positions, ending up as slaves or gladiators and so on, though they are not highly prized for these roles because of their skittish nature and physical frailties in comparison to Earth Ponies and Mules.

Magical expertise is not particularly widespread. A unicorn is likely to know the basics of telekinesis and maybe a rudimentary trick or two relating to their special talent at best. Unicorns who show any meaningful level of magical expertise are assumed to be using Defiling Magic. Given the impact of Defiling Magic on the world around the user, ponies who are believed to be Defilers are ostracised, often violently encouraged to be somewhere else. The exception to this are Unicorns who have been officially sanctioned by the local Sorcerer Queen, either via an actual licence or by becoming one of her Templars. Nopony is eager to risk calling down the wroth of the Templars or a Sorcerer Queen, no matter how much everypony hates Defilers.

Spoiler: Pegasi

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Pegasus culture has shifted since the garden-ages gave way to the Era of War. Sorcerer Queen persecution after they showed support for the rebellious Earth Ponies forced them to abandon their traditional practice of building cloud cities as it made them too obvious a target for their powerful enemies. They survived by becoming more elusive, living a surface-bound, nomadic life. They roam the wastes in tribal groups, often creating and shepherding sandstorms to hide their temporary homes from view or to dissuade outsiders from venturing too near. They are paranoid and clannish. Whilst persecution by the forces of the Sorcerer Queens drove them to this, they do not reserve this suspicion for non-pegasi. Pegasi from outside the tribe are viewed with equal caution as any unicorn, changeling or earth pony. Once they have given their trust, their loyalty is fierce and unshakeable, though their harsh martial outlook on life means that the expect everypony to stand on their own feet in life, even pregnant mares and aged pegasi are expected to keep up with a tribe on the move or else be left behind.

Pegasi tribes are well suited to raiding, they have little qualms about relying on theft or strength of arms in order to survive.

Spoiler: Earth Pony

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Earth Pony's are hardy, physically superior ponies. They are fast and agile and strong and well suited in temperament and physiology to hard labour. This unfortunately makes them excellent slaves, a role which they are prized for. Once an Earth Pony has truly set their mind to a task they are likely to pursue it indefinitely, setting it aside only after serious amounts of coercion and not without a lot of grumbling. Earth Ponies who die without completing such a task have been known to rise up as an Undead abomination, to walk the land as penance for not being strong enough.

Outside of slavery, Earth Ponies do not claim a homeland. They tend to congregate in pseudo-nomadic tribes, settling in places that their ancestors once held dear, or that they believe they can make into a defensible and sustainable settlement.

Spoiler: Donkey

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Donkeys are rare outside of slavery. They are sturdy but slow and have a reputation for stubbornness. However, this is actually down to a mixture of their sharp mind and an enhanced sense of self preservation. It is very difficult to get a Donkey to do something, either by coercion, harrassment or threat once it has concluded it is unsafe. They are naturally better suited to the harsh environment of desert and deprivation that an Earth Pony however, making them well suited for a range of tasks that an Earth Pony slave is temperamentally or physically ill-suited to.

Outside of slavery, Donkeys tend to live relatively solitary lives, preferring small family groups to larger communities. They are generally happy to simply stay out of trouble. Given the opportunity, they are quick and eager learners and are generally quite friendly.

Spoiler: Mules

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Mules combine some of the better traits of Earth Pony and Donkey. They are fast and vigorous like an earth pony, sure-footed and hardy. They are also less obstinate than a Donkey, but retain the sharp mind and eagerness to learn as well as the Earth Pony's determination to finish a task. They tend to be bigger and tougher than either of their parents, longer lived under comparable conditions and are both more independent than and require less food than a regular pony. These traits make them highly prized slaves, suited both to harsh labours and the violent spectacle of the gladiatorial arena. However, they are not sterile and are unable to sustain their numbers through regular breeding. This means that the vast majority of all Mule's were born into slavery, knowing no parent but the whip and the lash, no lullaby but the clanking of the chains that bind them or the roar of the arena. They tend to have gruff personalities and are prone to violent reactions. Some shun friendship and community their whole lives, driven by spite and hatred alone, however most manage to find a sense of comradery amongst the ranks of their fellow slaves and manage to earn respect and favour amongst their peers.

EDIT- Mule's have slightly thicker heads than Pony's and have donkey-like ears and tend to have slightly thinner legs with stronger and harder hooves, however their general body-shape, their manes and their tales are all pony-like, coats are uniform like a pony's coat and they usually have a cutie mark.

Spoiler: Changelings

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Changelings have had to adapt to survive more than most races that still live. Able to survive on mundane food sources like meat or grain, they never-the-less require a steady diet of love in order to fuel the gifts they rely on for their survival. Bug Ponies, (as they are sometimes known) are the un-acknowledged masters of vast swathes of the wastelands, their fierce tribal communities able to eke out a living where other races would fail. Using a mixture of their greater desert-survivability, their natural cunning and mystical gifts they are able to thrive by capturing the creatures of the wastes, either to eat their meat or to cocoon them in psionic-jelly so as to feast on their emotions uninterrupted. This enables them to keep their tribe's talents and abilities suitably nourished and is vital for their survival. Changelings consider intelligent creatures to be acceptable prey as well, but after their long persecution and near-extinction, they have a cultural taboo about eating such creatures (either literally or via cocooning) unless it is strictly necessary.

However, over the years they have developed a pronounced taste for Pegasi emotions, the strong contrasting towards paranoia and loyalty giving the feathery-ponies psychic energies an irresistible flavour. As such, Changelings and Pegasi do not co-exist easily, due to the Changelings frequent predations.

Changelings value the tribe, or brood above all else. Once such familial bonds have been formed, they are unbreakable and unquestionable. However, Changelings sometimes find themselves having to make their way in the world outside of their Brood for a variety of reasons. When making their way in Pony society, a Changeling will often struggle to adapt to the alien value system and rules. Many find it easier to simply get by using the old ways, impersonating ponykind and seeking to feed via cunning and deceit. Without the reassuring presence of the Brood, such Changelings tend to be on edge, prone to the same kind of paranoia's as their favoured prey.

Changelings are insectile in appearance, with a thick chitinous skin, a hard horn-like spike through which they channel rudimentary magic and buglike wings which they are able to fly using. In their native form, their legs have several large holes, leading to the common slur "Cheese-Legs". Changelings never wear armour, but their shells often appear to be very brightly coloured, often verging on iridescence. Given that changelings are reflexive shapeshifters, it is hard to say with any accuracy what actually is their true form, however they often appear more buglike when raiding en-mass, head concealed as if beneath a helmet, whereas they have also been seen looking more openly pony-like, with regular manes to match their tails. Likewise, this iridescence is as likely to be a cultural trait, not unlike the wearing of cosmetics as it is to be a physical change they have undergone since the Era of War.

Spoiler: Bat Ponies

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Reclusive even before the Era of War took it's toll, the Bat Ponies were spared a degree of the ravages of war when Twilight reached a secret peace accord with them, under the terms of which she would free them from servitude to Luna and assist them in their efforts to hide themselves from the outside world. They rode out the majority of the catacylsm in isolation and despite the harsh and brutal nature of the world that remains, they have a number of thriving populations nestled in the dark and secret places of the Everfree Jungle. They make their homes in great caves dug into cliffsides and behind waterfalls. These cavernous strongholds are often crammed to bursting with Bat-Ponies during the day, the Bat-Ponies living in incredibly cramped conditions with little in the way of privacy. Strong and intimate bonds hold these tribes together like large families, the distinction between neighbour and sister being an almost purely academic one.

Each tribe is ruled by a Triumvirate of Elders. Each Elder represents a different life-path and is chosen for their wisdom, longevity and embodiment of their chosen path and they command great respect and obedience from the rest of the tribe. Upon reaching adolescence, a Batpony must choose one of the three paths and prove herself worthy of it. The Path of the Body preaches physical excellence, these ponies are the warriors of the tribe, it's chief hunters and scouts. It is usually the best represented path in a tribe, with a majority choosing to follow it. The next most populace path is the Path of the Heart. These ponies tend to both the jungle habitat of the tribe's territory but also the emotional and spiritual wellbeing of the tribe. The Path of the Mind is the last and by far the least popular of the three. It's devotees develop their minds to unlock secret techniques with which to defend the tribe, but they are often viewed with suspicion by other Bat Ponies, at least in part due to the rumours that they train their hearing until they can hear another pony thinking. They are often relied upon when the tribe must deal with those outside the tribe, especially the other Races.

Spoiler: Star Ponies

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Few things inspire such terror in a pony's heart as the terrifying Star-Beasts, such as the Ursa Major. Their sheer size alone would be enough, but their often cruel disposition and deranged, unhinged and bestial intelligence add a whole other level of horror to the sight of such a creature rising up above the horizon. Some say that in ages past, they were almost docile in comparison and some horrible magics or the ruin visited upon the world drove them all mad. Whatever the reason, it is hard to fathom what exactly could have convinced one of the Sorcerer Queens that it was a good idea to somehow magically combine them, whether via horrifying experiments or magical curse, with the common pony. But one of them did, and it really could have turned out a lot worse.

They are huge by pony standards, but stand barely a fraction of the size of their more monstrous sires. They have the same otherworldy, luminescent translucence and often have a mixture of pony and beastial features or simply the head of a beast on their overly large, sparkly shoulders. They inherited a lot of the dull-wittedness of their more bestial parent race and more than a touch of their madness, but on the pony side they gained the essentially placid, socially driven nature, eagerness to please and a driving desire to belong and to have a role in society. They are eager to communicate and to help where they can, and lacking as they do any real culture of their own, they rapidly adopt the cultural values of those who welcome them in and put them to use. Their sheer size makes them dangerous when roused to anger, but at heart they are simple, friendly and eager to please.

Well, that took rather longer than I had expected going in. Oh well, it didn't turn out too shabby at least.

OH! Totally forgot the Goats.

Spoiler: Goats

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Slight of frame and agile of limb, the spindly little creatures are pretty much incomprehensible for the most part. They live in the forests and jungles beyond the mountains and are it's uncontested masters. The goats live in tribal units, but they have a very strong racial unity, even though the tribes are divided politically into separate villages and communities. Wherever possible, they settle their differences peacefully. Except when it comes to outsiders, or other creatures that aren't Goats. Those they eat. Along with anything else that's edible. Which, to a goat, is pretty much anything other than goat, and they rarely bother with cooking.

They are also preposterously agile, able to climb sheer cliffs or twisting trees with equal ease. Some Goats have been known to suffer from a mysterious condition that causes frequent fainting whenever something dramatic happens, but it doesn't seem to hinder their hunting overly much.
EDIT - Also known for their horrifying war cries.

Spoiler: Photo Finish.odt

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Photo Finish – Magnificence

Photo Finish rules the grandest of cities, though to label it with such a small and simple description does not begin to do it justice. The city rises from the foothills of a mountain like an impossible dream of stone, a second and more ephemerally beautiful mountain grafted on to the existing ones, made to look squat and ugly in comparison. Improbable towers and arches dripping with an obscenity of intricate decoration and inlaid with rich and beautiful substances sprout chaotically, one from the other striving for height like a maddened mass of vegetation, choking each other in a desperate fight for the caress of the sun. In Queen Photo Finish's city, even the buildings must engage in the never ending battle for recognition and supremacy in the deadly arena of aestheticism. Only the most beautiful, novel and elaborate can survive in this rarefied bloodbath.
Welcome to the city of Photo Finish, the Unseen Queen. Welcome my little ponies, to Magnificence.

In simple terms Magnificence is a decadent folly. A city built on top of itself a dozen times over, each addition more extravagant and over-designed than the last. A mass of inter-connected growths with every inch thick with decoration. The main bulk of this beautiful monstrosity has long since ceased to be a number of separate buildings. It clings to the side of the mountains, it's foundations running deep into the foothills beneath and it's towers stretching up to rival the mountains themselves at their highest. The streets of Magnificence don't run upon the ground, the streets are corridors running through buildings formed from the merging of other buildings, inside and outside blurring in a feverish mass of opulence and decay. Broad streets winding through open areas, linking square to garden are in truth built upon the roofs of previous strata in the unrestrained excess that Magnificence embodies. It is a nightmare place, with the newest reaches lavished with the kind of wealth that could once have bankrupted nations, the finest artisanal stone from Maud's mines, crystals from the heart of Cadence's glittering city-state and vast swathes of slick black mirroring made from vast sheets of obsidian. Golden paint and the finest hardwoods available are used without restraint in ever more outlandish designs. As you travel away from these most fashionable of districts however, the opulence spoils, with the novelty worn away neglect takes hold. The elements claw their way inside, rotting roof timbers, creeping through windows and slowly blurring the distinction between in and out-side. Gold paint flakes away, wood begins to crack and grow brittle. Glittering surfaces dull with age and grime, gemstones are pried from their settings to re-use elsewhere in the newer parts of the city and the area is no longer spoken of. As you track the decay downwards and through the impossibly vast palace, what little remains of the excess is long lost beneath layers of filth and ruin, these regions fit only for grease burned kitchen slaves and those wretched creatures yet useful enough to earn their keep within the City-Palace's walls through backbreaking, skin-tearing labour or grovelling obeisance as they tend to their betters every neurotic need or mad fear.

Outside the great walls of the city of Magnificence there clusters a second city. A desperate huddled swathe of shanty-town misery, crude wood and clay structures clinging at Magnificence's skirts like the most thoroughly broken-spirited of beggars. Like the city itself, building is built upon building, the filthy mass of dangerous, squalid subsistence shelters a veritable hive of desperate industry. The shanty town is bigger by far than the city of Magnificence, both in area filled and population. Slaves gangs work from the larger structures, either venturing into the city to sweat and bleed and die constructing and decorating the newest fabulous tumours to complicate Magnificence's skyline or slaving away in safer but significantly less pleasant surroundings, working endlessly to churn out the fashions and the trends in art, sculpture and clothing demanded by the Ponies of Magnificence. This sweatshop labour is the pride of Magnificence, the demand so high that the slave-workforce is by far the most skilled of it's kind in the land. It will never earn the slaves their freedom, nor even earn their slave-masters a seat at the higher tables of Magnificence, but the industry does fund the city and the slum-lords grow fat on their take even as the city-dwellers squander their vast wealth on pointless ostentation.

The the constant demand for the latest fashions has a more pressing reason for the ponies of Magnificence. Queen Photo Finish, it is said, is a pony of singularly refined taste. The mere sight of an unfashionable pony would offend her deeply, such disrespect can neither be risked nor tolerated. To that end, her brides make sure that the city is held to the highest standards at all times. The Templars Brides enforce the highest fashions ruthlessly. They are in truth the only laws that matter in Magnificence. Do as you will, but do not defy the Fashion Police. They enforce the sartorial whims of their Royal Bride upon the populace within the city walls, it is the duty they must perform in exchange for their astonishing powers and tutelage in defiling magic. It is not their only duty, but it is the only one talked about openly. When it comes to the Fashion Police's rulings, there is no appeal and there are no repeat offenders.

The duty that no one talks about is not a secret as such. The Templar's are openly referred to as the Queen's Brides. They never discuss their marital duties however and none who inquire too openly and too frequently live to tell the tale. However, the rumour goes that if you can safely steer the conversation to the topic of the bedroom or of bridal duties in the general sense, you may catch a glimpse of the Templar's reaction. A certain tautness about the eyes, a far-away look or a barely suppressed shudder.

Photo Finish makes no public appearances. She makes no speeches, appears at none of the many fabulous balls. She hasn't been seen publicly for generations in fact. Her business is performed entirely through her many Brides. Some few eager young fillies, desperate to change their station in life will seek to join the Brides of their own free will. They gain a position of power that demands unwavering respect in exchange for upholding their end of the bargain. Many Brides are instead chosen, some say by the other Brides on behalf of the Queen but others insist that the Unseen Queen has ways and means and that every pony who became a Bride was vetting by the Queen's eyes first using her powerful magic, even those who decided to seek her out of their own free will. The Queen maintains a vast complex in the heart of the city. It is said to be the single most beautiful place in all of dead-equestria, designed over thousands of years by the uncompromising genius herself, but none save the Brides and the Queen herself have seen it in a thousand years, and the Brides have little to say to outsiders.

Spoiler: Cadence.odt

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Cadence and the Crystal Empire

The Crystal Empire is one of the few cities that stood during the green age and the era of war. Though not unchanged, it alone of the major settlements traces it's lineage back to those long lost days and even beyond into the days of King Sombra, little more today than a story to scare foals with. The Crystal Empire styles itself as the sole remaining bastion of civilisation, drawing on it's uniquely ancient heritage for validation.

The city lies at the heart of the Glasslands, a vast wasteland of twisted crystal shards, vast glassy ravines and luminescent dunescapes of finely powdered crystal. Obsidian obelisks and glossy black blades of crystal tear upwards towards the sky defiantly, like blades lodged in the tortured gemlike landmass that once lay concealed around the city itself, now blasted and laid bare. Vast swathes of the Glasslands around the city have been stripped by the industrious Crystal Pony workforce, leaving the city surrounded by a network of canyons formed from open-cast mines, some dating back to the early years of the Queen's reign, whilst others are yet fresh, jagged and still in use.

The Crystal Mines are an apparently inexhaustible source of gemstones and is the chief source of Obsidian in the wider region. The work is backbreaking, brutal and frequently deadly. This means that the City has a pressing need for a steady supply of bodies to put to work. To this end the city engages in two methods of procuring such labour. The primary supply of disposable labour is slave labour. The Crystal Empire is one of the most demanding consumers in the trade, in terms of sheer quantity at least. Slave caravans beat a steady path to the city's gates, lured by the promise of guaranteed demand. The City also takes steps to supply it's own Slaves however, and any otherwise undefended settlement or unwary caravan in the region had best do what they need to in order to convince the Empire that they wouldn't serve it better as Slaves. The Crystal Empire has often resorted to launching daring raids on the cities of other Sorcerer Queens at times, though only ever when the city in question has either sufficiently let it's guard down or is for some reason otherwise unable to reply in kind.

The secondary source is an internal one. Strictly enforced social policy has numerous side effects and the ponies of the Crystal Empire are encouraged in no uncertain terms to swell their own numbers freely and frequently, secure in the knowledge that such foals that cannot be supported will be taken care of by the City itself and put to work for the good of the Citizenry. These ponies are not slaves but neither are they truly free, they exist as a servile underclass. There is a large social stigma attached to these Unwanted, these Children of the City. They are not permitted to own property and are very much treated as socially and morally inferior to the Free Citizens. They are encouraged to feel gratitude the ponies of the city for their benevolence and the protection they receive as nominal citizens of the Crystal Empire. Dissent and disobedience amongst the Children is stamped out forcefully, a policy described officially as tough love. The poor treatment of the Children by the other citizens is almost certainly due to the generalised feelings of guilt attached to surrendering foals to the City, leaving them to be raised by the Queen's Templars and put to work as serfs and drudges. The Crystal Ponies almost never talk publicly about the Children of the City, Cadences Orphans.

Life in the glittering city is not necessarily that much easier however. Whilst it is true that the city is one of the most beautiful, it is a harsh beauty. Burning, hateful sun refracting through cold hard crystal, light reflecting from the many sharp-edged, gaudily coloured structures that define Crystal Empire architecture. Wide, spacious streets filled with abrasive squalls of glass-dust that wears away at anything more delicate than that singular building material, like wood or cloth or the ponies themselves. The citizens of the Empire habitually wear eye coverings and face-masks, to keep the airborne shards away from lungs and eyes. Those on the lowest rungs of society may find themselves unable to afford these simple precautions and slaves who live long enough often go blind or develop breathing problems. A face with bleeding eyes, a ragged cough with blood-red spittle are tell-tale social signifiers, telling of long hours working the mines.

Ponies fortunate enough to have a hoof on the ladder and a place in the city proper are left to live their lives much more freely, merchants, mercenaries and craftsmen make a living pandering to the whims of the upper classes who creep and crawl and manouver desperately to seek favour with the Queen. Families in the Crystal Empire succeed or are ruined by the favour of the Crystal Empress, and the more powerful noble houses collect subordinate houses and businesses into factions that fight ruthlessly for control and position. The Assassins of the Crystal Empire rarely lack employment for long.

And there is one law above all that they must all be seen to observe, both by deed and by word. Love above all. Cadence, Queen of Hearts and Empress Sublime says that there is no power greater than love and so all must obey and dedicate their lives to confirming this. From their earliest days, Fillys and Colts are encouraged to woo and to court openly, to profess their feelings and to dedicate their free time to romantic pursuits or activities that will aid future efforts. Upon reaching adolescence, ponies are traditionally betrothed, either to a sweetheart or to the heir of another family so as to build greater ties. Many of the more powerful houses tend to betroth their foals to each other from birth, so that the young ponies are safely accounted for early in life and can dedicate themselves to making their grand romance ever more showy and elaborate. Actual feelings are unimportant because it is almost all in service to the simple goal of placating Cadence. Upon coming of age, all ponies are to be married. It is a simple matter of law, an unquestionable imperial decree. Unmarried ponies at that age are paired up by the Queen's Templars and duly married. Any pony who refuses, or who fails to convince the Templars that their love for their partner is genuine and the most important thing in their life is sanctioned harshly. Such ponies can expect to see the rest of their days out in the slave pits, working naked in the mines as the glass-storms slowly take their sight away.

This is the chief duty of all Templars in the city. Whilst they serve on the front-lines in times of war and often lead the forces on slave taking raids, no duty they have is held to be more important than their policing of the romances of the city. A pony without love in their heart cannot be trusted, is clearly broken and corrupt and will only bring ruin and despair to those around them is the official line, handed down from the Queen herself and all must be seen to observe it wholeheartedly. There are no provisions against keeping multiple lovers necessarily, as long as all such pairings are passionate affairs of the heart and the primary pairing isn't neglected. Even in the Crystal Colosseum, the Gladiators are kept paired up at all times and Gladiatorial matches are traditionally fought by matched pairs, lovers fighting side by side against other lovers or back to back against terrible beasts to prove the strength of their love. Sometimes a pair will be forced to fight each other to the death, a grand spectacle reserved for special occasions. If the pair refuse, they will be applauded and immortalised in song and artwork, but they will be put to death side by side by the Queen herself. If they fight, but their battle is not sufficiently convincing, the turmoil and wrenching loss not poetic enough then their paring will be said to have been exposed as a sham and both will be put to death. If the battle is suitably heart-wrenching, the survivor will be granted great rewards, riches and status and perhaps even freedom. They will also be allowed a small period of suitably public mourning before being expected to find a new partner.

Above all else, the ponies of the Crystal Empire must love their Queen. They must show gratitude for the guidance and care and necessary discipline she lavishes upon her people and they must bathe her in their unending, unquestioning love. Life in the City is a constant pantomime, a dance in which this above all else must be seen to be done. Festivals are thrown in her honour, artists compete to create ever more elaborate tributes, the crowds drive themselves into ever more competitive displays of ecstatic adoration at her appearances and Cadence seemingly takes all of this hysteria entirely at face value. In truth, it is widely believed that the Queen of Hearts went mad many hundreds of years ago. Ponies in the know whisper between confidants that the death of Prince Shining Armour did irreparable damage to her stability, damage that even her reanimation of him was unable to fully remedy. An eternity spent doting upon the blank, emotionless Prince has driven her steadily down a path of internal fantasy. His form throbbing with Alicorn-magic, the Unicorn Shining Armour is an unstoppable sentinel in defence of the city and a force to be reckoned with upon it's battlefields, but he is passionless and cold and will not pretend otherwise, even for his doting bride. He doesn't even regret what he lost. The Dead do not regret.

[Tiki Snakes]

Slightly too much for one post, so here's the second half. I've no idea if I considered any of these entries complete at the time and they're all pretty much first and last drafts. Documents planned and never to be completed include Lyra, Flaura, Fauna and Weather. Various other writings done in the threads themselves presumably still exists, but were never really collated in any meaningful way. Likewise, I think I included some picture resources to go with the original city write-ups posted here but don't consider that worth hunting down.

Spoiler: Dark Sun Pony Dump part 2

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Spoiler: Maud.odt

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Maud - Karst
Karst rises dramatically from the desolate landscape, a massive structure looming over the flat, arid ground. The landscape around the city is endlessly and relentlessly level, broken up by imposing hills, tall and with almost vertical sides so that they look more like a series of bulwarks and watchtowers than geological formations. The area is almost entirely devoid of vegetation, the ground arid and blasted. The lifeless terrain is especially treacherous, with crevasses known to open up beneath unwary caravans with little notice. Merchants attempting to trade with Karst are wise to stick to the Queen's road, an extensive limestone formation that leads the way safely across the flatlands to the city itself.

The city itself is a singular construction. Vast solid slabs of stone torn from the bowels of the earth form mighty walls, prodigiously thick, tall and smooth, they are said to be utterly unbreachable. They carve the city into distinct districts laid out in regular proportions, encircling the central Fortress-Palace. The gates to the city open on to a huge avenue that leads directly from the outer gates to the Sorcerer Queen's fortified palace, looming over the rest of the city in all of it's heavy, angular glory. Smooth undecorated lines and sheer surfaces. The grand avenue is broken up by several vast gates, each the twin of the outer gates. If the outer gate was breeched, this would allow the defenders to turn the grand avenue from a potential weakness to be exploited into a dedicated killing-field, as those inside would make easy targets for the defenders upon and inside the city's walls. The main districts radiate off of the central avenue via gates of their own. Those areas that can't be reached directly from the central avenue (being as they are located radiating out from behind the central fortress) are mainly accessed via the main districts, though there are less obvious access points between there and the Fortress-Palace. These are the secondary districts.

Buildings inside the districts vary according to the size and utility required of them and according to their district, but are without exception also designed to best coordinate with the other buildings in the district in terms of sharing what sunlight makes it past the city's walls and allowing the optimum circulation of fresh air. Most buildings in the more upmarket districts get a reasonable amount of daylight and those that cannot (due to the shape of the walls and the arc of the sun through the sky) are assigned where possible to tasks that benefit or do not suffer unduly from the shade. The primary districts are largely utilitarian in nature, devoted to various industries and services. Merchants and Artisanal houses function as the upper classes of Karst, owing to the utilitarian and meritocratic culture of the city. Such service industries as exist in Karst no not rise to significant positions of prominence and there is little in the way of hereditary privilege or a traditional noble-class. A house which has little to offer the city, which is not capable of pulling it's own weight and contributing is likely to have it's assets seized and it's members expelled from the city or put to work beneath.

The primary districts are separated from the secondary districts by way of the water-gardens. This singular, angular wonder is a testament to the subterranean engineering that Karst is perhaps most renowned for. Large bodies of standing water run between the two districts, overlooked by the city walls and with grand arched bridges spanning the short distance across allowing passage between the primary and secondary districts. From the bridges you can see all the way from the inner-walls of the Fortress-District to the massive outer walls.

The secondary districts are agricultural in nature, an engineering wonder made possible by the might and wisdom of the city's implaccable queen and the backbreaking labour of thousands of slaves. Where the other districts sit at ground level, overlooked by the walls that surround them, the gardens of the Secondary Districts are raised up at the same height of the walls, so as to catch the sun unimpeded. Carefully cultivated crops are tended at all hours, the irrigation that makes it possible to grow such a plentiful harvest powered by the crippling labour of the underclass of Karst, many meters below the city. Beneath this raised garden live the poor of the city, those who are skilled and loyal enough to be trusted to work in the gardens or in maintaining the irrigation-works as well as those who work in the primary districts in menial roles. These ponies get to glimpse the sun during their daily tasks before returning to their lives in the eternal shadow of their sub-district.

By far the vast majority of the ponies of Karst live in the Tertiary districts however. The tertiary districts lie beneath the city itself, in it's endless tunnels and vast subterranean workings. This labyrinthine undercity is practically a city in and of itself, living at subsistence levels in the dank night-time world beneath the stark wonder of Karst. The ponies of the undercity are policed by Maud's templars just as those above, but where the ponies of the surface city can expect the Templar's to be harsh but essentially even-handed, the ponies of the undercity are valued so poorly that they can expect no such thing. Corruption and vice run rampant in the under-city, the only unquestionable rule being that you never cross the Templars, who carouse and exploit their position of unrivalled power safely out of the watchful eye of their Queen. It's not so much that they can get away with it because Maud doesn't know about their abuses in the undercity, it's simply that Queen Maud does not value the lives and the liberty of the throngs of ponykind wretched enough to call the hivelike undercity their home and so the Templars are permitted their excesses as long as they do their duty in the world above.

The ponies of the undercity are not all slaves, but in the undercity the distinction between free pony and chattel is blurred and indistinct. Many of both toil in the mines, or work to shore up and maintain the many miles of tunnel. Hundreds work each day in the mills, turning the great wheels that provide the power necessary to pump the water up from the depths into the water-garden and to power the irrigation system itself. They work in the hope of impressing the overseers with their reliability and their hard-working virtue sufficiently to be deemed worthy of joining the working-poor of the secondary district and earning themselves lives of relative comfort and safety. The largely unregulated nature of the undercity means that it has grown without oversight however, and it has over the centuries developed many of it's own distinct cultures and districts. For the right price, it's said you can get an Underpony to do anything, no matter how vile or degrading the task.

Spoiler: Trixie.odt

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Trixie – Trixopalousa

At the other end of the verdent sweep of the Flower Forest the trees begin slowly to thin and give way to cracked earth and open cast mines filled with toiling slaves. The city of Trixopalousa sits at the heart of an enormous crater, it's squared off and fiercely regular architecture starkly in opposition to the torn up landscape that surrounds it. Dark stone gives way to glossy black shards of obsidian, glittering from beneath boulders or inside the many huge cracks that spiderweb across the roughly level plane of the inside of the crater-wall. It is believed that a mountain once stood where the crater and the city now stand, torn down in a terrible sorcerous battle or mined to death by countless generations of slaves at the command of the Great and Powerful Queen Trixie. Whatever the case, only Trixopalousa stands there now and the mountains that shelter the Flower Forest have little to say about any lost sister.

The City is in truth little more than an elaborate fortress. To approach the city means crossing the ring of jagged rocks of the crater's edge and that's only possible in any numbers along the main road, worn treacherously smooth by the hooves of a thousand slaves a day. The city itself is surrounded by thick squat walls. Square towers rise periodically along the wall, which encloses the city in a perfect square. The angular buildings that take up the space inside are arranged in rigid blocks and rows, with wide empty roads and periodic open squares with elaborate statues glorifying the ruler in depictions of her many victories and triumphs. The statues sit above large, dry fountains and have never been filled in living memory.

The buildings inside the city, on these wide and regular roads house the upper echelons of Trixopalousa society, favoured families who have earned their way to prominence through dedicated military service and through providing the most conquered slaves as tribute to their queen. These large, heavily fortified buildings often enclose central courtyards and can be quite comfortable on the inside. From the outside, these buildings appear little more than glorified guard-postings. External windows are narrow and offer excellent views of anyone in the streets and the doors are both small and sturdily constructed. Any army that managed to breech the city walls would find those spacious streets turned into rivers of blood, carefully planned killing-fields to grind an attacking force to splinters in the hour of it's apparent victory.

At the center of the City stands a vast and oppulant pleasure-palace at the center of a series of fiercely defended fortifications. Here is where the city's glorious ruler dwells, surrounded by beauty and art. The pleasure-gardens in the palace grounds are carefully cultivated and maintained at some expense. They are littered with gaudy icons and statuary, all with the single theme of the glory and majesty of the Sorcerer Queen Trixie. What slaves and vassals as are permitted into this sacred space and into the presence of Trixie herself spend their lives desperately trying to assuage the violent paranoias and desperate self-aggrandisements of the city's self-styled immortal and invincible protector. They strive to baffle her with flattery and lull her into peacefullness through unending obeisance. When they fail, ponies die. Those within immediate reach are usually the first, denounced as being traitors and conspirators before the Queen gathers her guards and descends upon the subterrainian districts of her own fortress to violently surpress imagined uprisings.

Beneath the streets of the city lie a network of sewer tunnels, long empty of freely flowing water and adapted into dwellings for those who have not yet distinguished themselves in Trixopalousan society. Merchants and artisans, such as survive in the city tend to dwell here. They may earn the favour of the God-Queen briefly from time to time, but only the military families ever truly keep it for long as she values little so much as the spreading of her influence across the dead world and the swelling of her legion of cowering, broken-spirited slaves. These unfortunate creatures are forced to toil endlessly to provide Trixopalousa with the constant supply of Obsidian required to outfit her ravening armies. All done by hoof of course, as even the simplest wagons or wheeled aparatus are strictly prohibited on pain of death.

Those slaves that are required to labour in the city itself dwell beneath the sewers, in the half-finished tunnels and caverns that lie beneath in the dead roots of the lost mountain. The majority however must simply huddle together in the mines themselves, the lucky ones be able to count on a cave to protect them from Equestria's murderous weather but the rest must simply take their chances. Deaths are beyond frequent and desperation turns many a slave to cannibalism. Those strong willed enough or mad enough to bring themselves to do this are able to keep their strengths up far better than the rest. These ghoulish pragmatists are in turn the more likely to survive and over time gather power to themselves in the form of like minded ponies and slaves desperate for what little help is available to them from one who might just be able to give it.

Guards treat the slave-ponies with a feverish brutality. Better to be feared by the gathered hordes, given the rumours and the unnatural look in some of their eyes when they think they are unobserved.

Spoiler: Derpy.odt

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Derpy - Flowergarden

Nestled in the crook of a mountain range surrounded on every other side by blasted badland, there sits one of Equestria's few surviving forests. It is one of the only places where you can find something resembling the lost land of Equestria, but that isn't to say that the Flower Forest hasn't undergone changes since the world that was ended. It is as dangerous as it is verdent, filled with beauty and life and all the savagery and brutality that entails. Somewhere in the heart of this rare sanctuary lies the city of Flowergarden and home of the merciless sentinels that protect the fragile ecosystem of the forest.

Flowergarden is not a city in the traditional sense. It is not hewn from rock and stone, baked clay or elaborate structures of sawn and painted timber. It is made almost entirely from living materials, a series of mud huts and towering treehouses arranged into small, irregular villages all contained within the protective ring of the great briarpatch which surrounds Flowergarden like a wall would a more traditional city. The briars are thick and wild, their talon-like thorns making short-work of beasts and ponies unwise enough to attempt to cross it. It has grown tall and strong, it's roots watered by blood.

The city does not divide evenly into districts. However, a certain underlying structure always remains despite the organic shifting of the homes that make it up over generations. Those who are most favoured in society live towards the center of Flowergarden, clustering around the grand central temple tree and the Forest Goddess who resides within. Those who have dissapointed the Goddess or who have fallen in the eyes of society are forced furthest out from this hub to live in the hungry shadows of the Briar Wall. All others dwell somewhere in between, constantly vying for the approval of their beloved Goddess and the station that comes with it.

Worth in Flowergarden comes almost entirely in the context of approval from the city's God-Queen, Mother of the Forest and the Falling Rain. The Mother-Forest-Queen, or Mofeen is a Sorcerer Queen, one of the ancient and terrible defilers that rule so much of what remains of the world. But whilst it is not unusual for a Sorcerer Queen to claim divinity, Derpy is unique in that her subjects genuinely hold that belief. They shower their Mofeen with adulation and adoration, vying with each other for the unparalleled honour of her smile. She is their world, the one from whom all life springs and who guides them in their duties as protectors of this rare and spectacular forest.

Derpy doesn't rule so much as lead by example. She devotes herself to the protection of her forest, driving out loggers and hunters who might threaten either the trees themselves or the beasts and spirits that call them home. In turn, ponies who do the most to protect the forest or best enable the wider tribe to do so please the Mofeen most. This can be in the form of the careful and sustainable harvesting of produce to feed the tribe, or in the brutal retribution dealt out to those who threatened the trees.

What the Mofeen does not do is rule in any meaningful sense. Her approval and dissapointment function like holy decrees, but she does not directly make proclamations or issue edicts. Her city follows her out of love, not fear or mindless obedience. The city also polices itself to a degree. Those most favoured may eventually prove themselves thoroughly enough for the Mofeen to take them directly under her leafy-wing. Drawing away from the rest of society, these most trusted elite are taught powerful secrets and weild immense power in society, but almost always subtly and in the shadows. The Fillies of the Mofeen hold themselves apart from the rest of society, leading it on a local level by whispering advice in the correct ear, letting their collective will be known through rumour and inference.

Those who speak innapropriately or with insufficient adoration of the Mofeen earn the displeasure of the Fillies. Others who slack in their duties to the forest may also attract their baleful attention, as might those whose interests or loyalties do not lie with the city. Ponies unlucky enough to find themselves in this position can expect the Fillies to visit them in the night. Their deaths are swift and discrete and the forest makes full use of their mortal remains.

For her part, Derpy seems pretty genuine in her overriding devotion to preserving and even expanding the forest into the wasteland. There is no swifter way to earn the displeasure of the Mofeen and her Fillies than to be caught using Defiling magic, despite the fact that as a Sorcerer Queen she must surely be one of the most powerful Defilers that ever lived. Perhaps guilt for past deeds drives her to bring life back to a land that she helped slay. Perhaps she merely wishes to grow her following by earning the reverence of ponies across the wasteland under the guise of the life-bringing Mofeen. Perhaps she just really likes flowers. Who can say? Some few may suspect the truth who have gotten close enough to the forests enigmatic ruler, but it is not wise to discuss such things in Forestgarden. The trees have ears, and the owls are not what they seem.

Spoiler: Flim Flam.odt

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Flim Flam Brothers – The Free Cities.
All rights reserved.

The Free Cities lie in a region of blasted plains and dry dusty ground. Vast rubble-fields with well worn roads cutting clean paths through them, leading out across the wasteland to many far away places. It sits like a pair of spiders at the center of web carved into the rocky ground itself, the twin cities staring at each other across the empty banks of a great dead river. A single aqueduct of singularly enormous size stretches across the rocky badlands towards the cities from it's source in the far off mountains.

The twin cities sprawl in an ungainly mess on either side of the dead river. Constructed mainly from sandstone, both halves of the city have grown extensively over the centuries but without any guiding plan or principle beyond the limitations imposed by the geography and the limited resources available in the region. The buildings of the region are mostly sandstone, with smooth regular walls and flat roofs. Where wealth expands the options, neighborhoods become resplendant with vibrant paints, vast gaudy domes and spires and elaborate carvings and statuary. The one unifying feature is the ubiquitous network of aqueducts. They are spread throughout the two cities at various heights and angles all branching off the grand aqueduct that towers over all but the tallest towers of the Free Cities, some terminating in public spaces and others eventually making their way to large tanks beneath the more established districts. Without exception, the aqueducts stand dry and empty.

The network of aqueducts were once the wonder of the Free Cities. They provided a steady supply of a very rare resource, directly into the lives of those lucky enough to have established themselves in the trade-focused heart of the region. When they ran dry talk ran to rumours of sabotage and mismanagement. Distrust blossomed into blame and civil war came to the city. It was into this chaos that two strangers arrived. Each approached the elders of one half of the city seperately and offered their goods and services in support of the conflict. Metal weaponry and supplies of water, spices and slaves and art from across the wasteland made their way into the city as the strangers made deals and alliances. The bloody conflict of a city at war with itself continued for a generation, each stranger cheerfully facilitating the council of elders in their half of the twinned city, always ready with a carefully drafted contract.

There came a day when those involved paused to take stock of the cost of the bloody and senseless conflict, bury their dead and decide on what came next. The elders from both cities called a grand council and convened to talk truce. Peace came to the city with the cold realisation that while they were pre-occupied, the strangers had tied them up in inescapable bonds. Everything belonged to them now. Every brick and stone, every grain and every drop of blood. Sooner or later, one stranger or the other held anything you cared to name under an unbreakable contract.

Today, the city is still ruled in name by the Council of Elders, but all power in the Twin City rest with the two mysterious strangers who had been so happy to help. Flim resides in a vast palace on the west coast of the dead river and Flam in it's mirror image on the east side.

In the Free Cities, anything is possible for a price and everything is for sale. Money is truly power, and everything has a cost. Tithes and bribes and taxes and fees, nothing happens without cash changing hooves. Those smart or ruthless enough to play the system can climb quite high, gathering wealth and the power that comes with it to them and their family. Cross either of the Flim Flam brothers interests however and all your wealth and power can evaporate overnight. No laws get enforced, no crimes committed, no deals done without them taking a cut. In a city where wealth is power, the Flim Flam brothers are omnipotent and all that matters is that their endless lust for financial conquest be satiated.

The beating heart of the twin cities is trade. Merchant Houses do the majority of their business here in the city, under the watchful auspices of the Merchant's Guild which of course takes it's cut of all major transactions. Merchant Houses attempting to do business without going through the Flim Flam brothers and their Merchant's Guild find themselves undercut by their competitors, their goods stolen by bandits and their strongholds raided by mercenary armies. Consequently, the Free Cities see a constant stream of caravans travelling through them and a weary traveller can almost always find a bed for the night if he has the ability to pay for it. All the wonders of the wasteland flow through the twin cities sooner or later and it is said that you can find your very hearts desire in the many labrynthian bazaars but it will always cost you dearly.

Those who prove themselves unwilling or unable to pay their way in the city become property of the Flim Flam brothers. There is no trial, there is no hearing. There is no question of guilt or innocence. If you are unable to pay then you belong to them. You'll find yourself deep in their subterrainian debtors prison and you'll never see the sky again unless you reach an arrangement with them. Eventually, most inmates see sense and swear themselves into indentured servitude. Depending on your marketable skills and the size of your debt, your life after this point will either be brutal and brief of long and relatively comfortable. But be warned, everything has a cost in the Free Cities, even room and board in debtors prison. The longer it takes you to sign away your freedom, the smaller the chance of you ever earning it back. It is no surprise that the Flim Flam brothers chief resource is a supply of motivated but disposable labour with which to set to work as they see fit, whether mining salt or increasing the numbers of a mercenary troop.

Those few who earn the favour of one of the brothers are raised above the station of other citizens of the free city. These princes of the universe, these firey young upstarts are untouchable. They have by implication the wealth and protection of the brothers behind them and so they are free to indulge their every whim and impulse, no matter how morally repugnant or debauched. The only rule they must abide by at all costs is to never cost their lords and masters money. They have endless liberty across the city and dark powers at their command as well, so long as they are able to further bloat the coffers of the brothers.

To be at the other end of the scale in the Free Cities is to be less than cattle. You have no rights except those you can afford and though the wealth of the city will be built on your back, swelled by the sweat of your brow and the blood that you shed you will be looked down on with naked scorn by those who have been lucky or ruthless enough to stay a step above you on the ladder.

Spoiler: Luna.odt

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Luna – Palat Somni

The sands of the desert and the cracked earth of the badlands eventually give way altogether to the shifting pseudo-sea, the endless salty abyss that is the Sea of Silt. This treacherous mass looks like a desert of fine sand but swallows any foolish enough to enter it like the ghost of an ocean. Only by using dedicated craft, Silt-skimmers and the like can the Silt-Sea be crossed. The expanse is haunted by monsters fit to give even the hardiest wasteland surviver nightmares. Worms of impossible size, vast leviathans with cavernous maws fit to swallow the largest ships. Scuttling parasites that might at any moment swarm over the side of the hull and strip the crew to the bone. Spectral abominations that seep out from between the cracks and into the unguarded minds of unwary silt-sailors or fell creatures that would lure a silt-skimmer onto the rocks with songs of deathly beauty. If you brave all of this and venture out far enough you may find yourself hitting upon a chain of broken islands, scattered across the inhospitable sea. The shores bristle with vast, sun-bleached bones and the skyline is broken by the sand-drowning ruins of a long forgotten city. If the sandstorms that blight the region abate long enough for one to make landfall, an intrepid enough explorer might find themselves wandering the long dead streets of Palat Somni.

Wide open streets and tall buildings with smooth and gently slanted walls choke on the ever drifting sand dunes. Fleshless skeletons huddle in dark corners of the empty and abandoned buildings. Once it was home to a vast city teeming with life, bustling with busy ponies living their lives in service to their City's Sorcerer Queen, the ancient alicorn princess, Luna. The wind-scoured faces of the city's surviving buildings have long since abandoned all pretence of decoration, but elaborate engravings honouring the Princess of the Night still survive in some of the better sheltered interiors to tell the partial story of a city long lost to the wastes. Once, Palat Somni was a city without equal but today none remain, not even Princess Luna. Now only the Dead remain.

Those few to have heard the whispers of this far off place may share legends of a dark and terrible defiler and her shadowy minions, cast down in her hubris by those she thought were friends and allies. Grisly tales of a city put to death alongside it's Princess. For some, whispers of this long lost relic of the past are not intrigue enough. These insatiable scholars may exchange further tales of lost treasure, or terrible artifacts buried in the tomb-city of Palat Somni. Some few go further however, for there are whispers if you know where to listen that would tell you of a desperate plan and a cunning trick, of a powerful Sorceress fleeing her own dying body into the realm of dreams and of the depraved cultists that might have saught out this vengeful spirit, deep within the catacombs of Palat Somni, or deep inside their own unconscious minds. Perhaps they say, if one could only sleep deeply enough they could swear an oath to this terrible shadow and know true power.

Perhaps, they say, the shadow could be brought out into the world to pay back those that wronged it, and to wrap the burning world in the final comfort of an endless night. To drown the hateful sun and allow the faithful to escape the waking hell into a world of dreams. Or maybe they say that those foolish enough to chase after things in the night should pray that their quarry goes uncaught, in case something else wakes up with the sunrise, wearing your discarded flesh like a mask.

Some ponies would tell you that you should be careful what you might find when you close your eyes at night and that you shouldn't peer too closely at shapes half-glimpsed in a mirror.

Some might tell you to sleep tight. Sweet dreams, my little ponies.

So that's that, all there is, all there was and all there ever will be.

Make of it what you will.

[Forum Explorer]

Well, when Tiki last posted I did a Hunger Games run through using a random generator and narrated the results. So I decided to do it again, since he reminded me of it.

Spoiler: The Contestants

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Twilight Sparkle
Rarity

Celestia
Luna

Rainbow Dash
Fluttershy

Applejack
Pinkie Pie

Cadence
Shining Armor

Spitfire
Soarin

Trixie
Maud

Big Mac
Braeburn

Cheerilee
Nurse Redheart

Lyra
Bonbon

Ocativa
DJ P0N3

Derpy
Dr. Hooves

Spoiler: The Bloodbath

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As the tributes stand on their podiums, the horn sounds.

Luna kills Dr. Hooves with her own weapon.

Maud runs away from the Cornucopia.

Shining Armor runs away from the Cornucopia.

Cadence runs away from the Cornucopia.

Fluttershy runs away from the Cornucopia.

Big Mac snatches a bottle of alcohol and a rag.

DJ P0N3 runs away from the Cornucopia.

AJ runs away from the Cornucopia.

Celestia runs away from the Cornucopia.

Rainbow Dash runs away from the Cornucopia.

Braeburn grabs a backpack and retreats.

Twilight grabs a shovel.

BonBon runs away from the Cornucopia.

Derpy snatches a bottle of alcohol and a rag.

Redheart grabs a backpack and retreats.

Trixie snatches a pair of sais.

Soarin finds a canteen full of water.

Pinkie runs away from the Cornucopia.

Cheerilee and Octavia fight for a bag. Cheerilee gives up and retreats.

Lyra runs away from the Cornucopia.

Rarity grabs a shovel.

Spitfire stays at the cornucopia for resources.

Luna is taking out the Doctor before he can pull out any shenanigans, while everyone else loads up. A brief fight between Octavia and Cheerilee, but nothing comes of it. Big Mac gets some booze and a towel, proving himself to be an intergalatic hitchhiker at heart, while Trixie is apparently a ninja.

Spoiler: Day One

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Celestia sets Cadence on fire with a molotov.

Derpy overhears Twilight and Braeburn talking in the distance.

Rainbow Dash, BonBon, Cheerilee, and Trixie raid Redheart's camp while she is hunting.

Rarity discovers a cave.

Spitfire searches for a water source.

Pinkie sprains her ankle while running away from Big Mac.

AJ, Lyra, Shining Armor, Octavia, and Luna track down and kill Maud.

Fluttershy constructs a shack.

DJ P0N3 constructs a shack.

Soarin searches for a water source.

Celestia burns Cadence alive with the power of the sun. Meanwhile Luna has created a pack, and tears apart Maud. The Alicorn Sisters are out for blood today. A town starts to be built, and Pinkie Pie somehow sprains an ankle. Rainbow Dash has formed her own team, with Trixie, Bonbon, and Cheerilee. I don't know about you, but that team seems doomed to split.

Spoiler: Summery

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Dr. Hooves is killed by Luna
Maud is killed by Luna, Lyra, AJ, and Shining Armor
Cadence is killed by Celestia's doom laser

Spoiler: Night 1

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Lyra receives a hatchet from an unknown sponsor.

Luna receives clean water from an unknown sponsor.

Fluttershy tends to Octavia's wounds.

Shining Armor tries to sing himself to sleep.

Trixie tends to her wounds.

Rainbow Dash sees a fire, but stays hidden.

AJ thinks about home.

BonBon, DJ P0N3, and Rarity get into a fight. BonBon triumphantly kills them both.

Redheart and Braeburn hold hands.

Cheerilee destroys Big Mac's supplies while he is asleep.

Celestia receives a hatchet from an unknown sponsor.

Soarin sees a fire, but stays hidden.

Twilight stays awake all night.

Derpy receives a hatchet from an unknown sponsor.

Spitfire kills Pinkie as she tries to run.

Pinkie's injured ankle hampers her escape from Spitfire, letting her be run down. Meanwhile, Cheerilee pours Big Mac's booze over his towel and lights it on fire, which is spotted by Soarin and Rainbow Dash. Meanwhile Bonbon puts her secret agent training to good use, taking out Rarity and DJ P0N3 in a two against one fight. Earth Pony superiority for the win! Fluttershy is nice, while Trixie is self-sufficient. Meanwhile Redheart and Braeburn are shipped.

Spoiler: Day 2

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Redheart runs away from BonBon.

Lyra receives fresh food from an unknown sponsor.

Braeburn falls into a frozen lake and drowns.

Fluttershy taints Soarin's food, killing him.

Shining Armor hunts for other tributes.

Rainbow Dash questions her sanity.

Big Mac steals from Twilight while she isn't looking.

Octavia fishes.

AJ steals from Spitfire while she isn't looking.

Luna is unable to convince Derpy to not kill her.

Celestia diverts Trixie's attention and runs away.

Cheerilee collects fruit from a tree.

Starting off with Braeburn being incompetent, he manages to fall into a frozen lake and drown. Somehow. Fluttershy plays to her strengths, and poisons Soarin instead of fighting him, and Derpy mercilessly kills Luna in revenge for Dr. Hooves. Redheart must have heard Bonbon's brutal smackdown, and runs away rather then risk fighting her.

Spoiler: Summery

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Rarity and DJ P0N3 are judo chopped by Bonbon
Spitfire runs down Pinkie Pie
Fluttershy poisons Soarin
Braeburn wins a Darwin Award
Derpy gets vengeance on Luna

Spoiler: Night 2

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Rainbow Dash and Celestia huddle for warmth.

Twilight strangles Spitfire with a rope.

Cheerilee, BonBon, Redheart, and Shining Armor sleep in shifts.

Lyra convinces Big Mac to snuggle with her.

Octavia thinks about winning.

AJ, Fluttershy, Derpy, and Trixie tell each other ghost stories to lighten the mood.

Twilight takes out Spitfire with a well placed trap. Octavia is out to win, while Lyra is out to score with Big Mac. Fluttershy is scared out of her mind, while Trixie has a blast coming up with the most horrible thing she can imagine.

Spoiler: Day 3

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BonBon begs for Cheerilee to kill her. She refuses, keeping BonBon alive.

Twilight , Lyra, Rainbow Dash, and Octavia hunt for other tributes.

AJ is pricked by thorns while picking berries.

Redheart camouflauges herself in the bushes.

Celestia practices her archery.

Shining Armor begs for Trixie to kill him. She refuses, keeping Shining Armor alive.

Fluttershy dies of dysentery.

Big Mac camouflauges himself in the bushes.

Derpy receives a hatchet from an unknown sponsor.

BonBon is haunted by her guilty concious, while Shining Armor misses Cadence. Both are spared regardless. Everypony else moves around, gathering resources and preparing to fight. Except Fluttershy, who dies of some tainted food that she killed Soarin with.

Spoiler: The revenge of Nightmare Moon!

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The arena turns pitch black and nobody can see a thing.

Twilight survives.

Trixie flails her weapon around, accidently killing Big Mac.

Lyra finds and kills Octavia, who was making too much noise.

AJ trips on a rock and falls off a cliff.

Derpy survives.

BonBon survives.

Cheerilee survives.

Redheart flails her weapon around, accidently killing Rainbow Dash.

Shining Armor survives.

Celestia trips on a rock and falls off a cliff.

Suddenly the sky goes dark as the arena is plunged into a 1000 seconds of darkness! In the confusion Redheart kills Rainbow Dash, and Trixie kills Big Mac. Lyra must have picked up some secret agent training from Bonbon, as she stealth kills Octavia. Meanwhile Applejack falls off a cliff. Celestia tries to save her, but can't pull up in time, crashing to her own death as well.

Spoiler: Summery

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Spitfire: Strangled by Twilight's rope trap
Fluttershy: Eats her own poisoned food by accident
Big Mac: Randomed by Trixie
Rainbow Dash: Randomed by Redheart
Octavia: Necksnapped by Lyra
AJ and Celestia: Fell to their deaths.

Spoiler: Night 3

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Derpy receives an explosive from an unknown sponsor.

Lyra shoots a poisonous blow dart into Cheerilee's neck, slowly killing her.

Trixie convinces Twilight to snuggle with her.

BonBon, Shining Armor, and Redheart get into a fight. Redheart triumphantly kills them both

Derpy is armed and ready. Lyra showcases another trick taught to her by Bonbon, killing Cheerilee via poison dart. But Bonbon and Shining Armor are still depressed, and pick a fight with Redheart, who kills them both. And in important news, Twixie is canon!

Spoiler: The Feast!

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The cornucopia is replenished with food, supplies, weapons, and memoirs from the tributes' families.

Redheart and Lyra threaten a double suicide. It fails and they die.

Twilight accidently steps on a landmine.

Trixie decides not to go to The Feast.

Derpy takes a staff leaning against the cornucopia.

Derpy blows up Twilight, while Redheart and Lyra try and trick their way out, killing themselves in the process. Up next, the epic match between lovable background pony, and antagonistic magician. Who will win?

Spoiler: Day 4

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Derpy strangles Trixie with a rope.

And Derpy strangles Trixie with her own animated rope! A fitting finale that only your imaginations can describe!

Coming from behind after her partner was killed, and taking down Luna herself, Derpy played tactical, only killing twice. Though one was the Alicorn of Night, and the other was Trixie. So neither could be seen as an easy kill. Also she technically killed Twilight via landmine.

Spoiler: Our Champion

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[digiman619]

~Hunger Games: Equestria~

Dang it, I was rooting for Shiny.

[DigoDragon]

Dang it, I was rooting for Shiny.

I was cheering on ninja Trixie. I'm happy she got as far as she did!

Hmm, not really any "ninja Trixie" artwork out there.

Spoiler

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Edit--
And now the office here looks like a daycare center. They painted big bold colors on half the walls. The colors don't even conform to any theme. Purple on Yellow? My inner artist is SCREAMING.

[digiman619]

I was cheering on ninja Trixie. I'm happy she got as far as she did!

Digo was rooting for Trixie? I'm shocked!

Spoiler: This is my shocked face

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[Aotrs Commander]

So speaking of bloodbaths, I very nearly accidently killed a PC today playing Shackled City

Well, actually, I very actully did and then blagged passed it (since level 2 is not really in a position for it to be fixable¹).

PCs ran into this slightly odd ogre, which is enthusatically but ineptly waving a falchion about (it is actualy an otyugh polymorphed into an ogre for, I dunno, ask the module writer) - so it isn't proficient with it and is only on +4. So, it spends most of the combat missing, because I don't roll above single digits and then finally, I get a confirmation of a critical, which I cheerfully annouce with my usual, "I'mma hurt the PCs now" relish.

And then I look at the damage in the module stats.

2D6+7. Times two, because crit.

And I was like quietly "[expletive]!"

So, I rolls my dice (and this is the EXACT reason I always roll everything behind my screen) and quietly take some off and hedge a bet at the bard/cleric's ² hitd and ...28...? (Because the player heard me mutter 14 before I could adjust it down further (it was actually something like 16=>32).) Which was enough (even with death at -max hits/2 or -10, which ever is higher) to kill him.

We were just about to move on with the battle (the player's a bit put out, I'm a bit put out myself and I'm quietly frantically starting to plan how the hell to fudge that they are going to be able to res him), when I remember about Power Attack. (Which, technically, I had thought about doing several times, up to and including that attack. And as I'm the DM, I don't have to tell the players this sort of thing, though I often do. So it's not a total lie...) And thus, given he was power attacking, that would have failed the confirmation³, so the bard/cleric only took 18 damage (14+PA, which was still wrong now, I think about it, it should have been 22, but that still wouldn't have killed and shut-up nobody questioned it!), only enough to drop him to -2.

So, they killed it - eventually, after several rounds of it missing them (legitimately, as I was back to single digits) and them rolling just as bad.



But as I said to the players, it was a... strange design decision to have a monster dealing 2D6+7 with a high-crit weapon attacking a level 2 party. (Granted, in core 3.5 it would have had a lot less hit points than a Defiant 1 templated boss monster in 3.Aotrs, but then again, it was fighting seven all-3.Aotrs-options characters not six core ones.) But a +4 was still a 50% chance of hitting the bard/cleric at the best of times and it's a very quick way to randomly kill a PC. (Core 3.5 PCs also don't get max hits evey level, like 3.Aotrs do, so that makes the damae even worse). It's the high crit chance on top of the high damage that seems off. Yes, sure, if the thing is waving around and full power attacking, it's on +0, but you still stand a fair chance of offing a PC with a moderate roll and you could very easily do a TPK. And this isn't even an end-level boss or something, it's like the first encounter in a dungeon.

Trouble with playing so many fairly high-power mid-level games is you tend to forget a bit how fragile level 1-2 characters are, else I might have paid more attention to the damage stats before blithly announcing it'd crited...!



¹I don't kill characters off, if I can at all help it, unless they are a) doing something stupid or b) until they are in a position to be able to fix it (or theorhetically c, at a dramatically approrpriate moment). Random accidental death due to bad dice is not something I approve of. For one thing, I want people to be attached to their characters and for another, I don't like having to crowbar new characters in (especially when both player and I have spent significant time in getting the backstories and such in!)

(I will cheerfully kill players like they are going out of fashion, but it's harder to replace characters...)

²The very character whose background was that Fresh Prince parody and whose player has managed to spend some commersurate effort in only speaking in rhyme. He deserved a not-random-accident-death on that basis alone!

³Cards on the table: that was a lie, of sorts.

[DigoDragon]

Trouble with playing so many fairly high-power mid-level games is you tend to forget a bit how fragile level 1-2 characters are

Eeyup. Was part of a 3.5 game of level 2s and I (the elf cleric) had found a hidden door thanks to elf-sense. I inform our trap-finding rogue about it, but mention that there appears to be no lock, so it might be guarded by some kind of trap. Well the DC to disable the darn thing was 25 (for a level two party?!) and so the ceiling trap comes down on us. DC to dodge was 20. I made it, but the rogue missed the DC by 1. The DM mercifully deals only half-damage: 32 points.

We quietly left the dungeon to go get another rogue.

Digo was rooting for Trixie? I'm shocked!

Spoiler: This is my shocked face

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BTW, I totally LOL'd on this.

[t209]

Slightly too much for one post, so here's the second half. I've no idea if I considered any of these entries complete at the time and they're all pretty much first and last drafts. Documents planned and never to be completed include Lyra, Flaura, Fauna and Weather. Various other writings done in the threads themselves presumably still exists, but were never really collated in any meaningful way. Likewise, I think I included some picture resources to go with the original city write-ups posted here but don't consider that worth hunting down.

Spoiler: Dark Sun Pony Dump part 2

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Spoiler: Maud.odt

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Maud - Karst
Karst rises dramatically from the desolate landscape, a massive structure looming over the flat, arid ground. The landscape around the city is endlessly and relentlessly level, broken up by imposing hills, tall and with almost vertical sides so that they look more like a series of bulwarks and watchtowers than geological formations. The area is almost entirely devoid of vegetation, the ground arid and blasted. The lifeless terrain is especially treacherous, with crevasses known to open up beneath unwary caravans with little notice. Merchants attempting to trade with Karst are wise to stick to the Queen's road, an extensive limestone formation that leads the way safely across the flatlands to the city itself.

The city itself is a singular construction. Vast solid slabs of stone torn from the bowels of the earth form mighty walls, prodigiously thick, tall and smooth, they are said to be utterly unbreachable. They carve the city into distinct districts laid out in regular proportions, encircling the central Fortress-Palace. The gates to the city open on to a huge avenue that leads directly from the outer gates to the Sorcerer Queen's fortified palace, looming over the rest of the city in all of it's heavy, angular glory. Smooth undecorated lines and sheer surfaces. The grand avenue is broken up by several vast gates, each the twin of the outer gates. If the outer gate was breeched, this would allow the defenders to turn the grand avenue from a potential weakness to be exploited into a dedicated killing-field, as those inside would make easy targets for the defenders upon and inside the city's walls. The main districts radiate off of the central avenue via gates of their own. Those areas that can't be reached directly from the central avenue (being as they are located radiating out from behind the central fortress) are mainly accessed via the main districts, though there are less obvious access points between there and the Fortress-Palace. These are the secondary districts.

Buildings inside the districts vary according to the size and utility required of them and according to their district, but are without exception also designed to best coordinate with the other buildings in the district in terms of sharing what sunlight makes it past the city's walls and allowing the optimum circulation of fresh air. Most buildings in the more upmarket districts get a reasonable amount of daylight and those that cannot (due to the shape of the walls and the arc of the sun through the sky) are assigned where possible to tasks that benefit or do not suffer unduly from the shade. The primary districts are largely utilitarian in nature, devoted to various industries and services. Merchants and Artisanal houses function as the upper classes of Karst, owing to the utilitarian and meritocratic culture of the city. Such service industries as exist in Karst no not rise to significant positions of prominence and there is little in the way of hereditary privilege or a traditional noble-class. A house which has little to offer the city, which is not capable of pulling it's own weight and contributing is likely to have it's assets seized and it's members expelled from the city or put to work beneath.

The primary districts are separated from the secondary districts by way of the water-gardens. This singular, angular wonder is a testament to the subterranean engineering that Karst is perhaps most renowned for. Large bodies of standing water run between the two districts, overlooked by the city walls and with grand arched bridges spanning the short distance across allowing passage between the primary and secondary districts. From the bridges you can see all the way from the inner-walls of the Fortress-District to the massive outer walls.

The secondary districts are agricultural in nature, an engineering wonder made possible by the might and wisdom of the city's implaccable queen and the backbreaking labour of thousands of slaves. Where the other districts sit at ground level, overlooked by the walls that surround them, the gardens of the Secondary Districts are raised up at the same height of the walls, so as to catch the sun unimpeded. Carefully cultivated crops are tended at all hours, the irrigation that makes it possible to grow such a plentiful harvest powered by the crippling labour of the underclass of Karst, many meters below the city. Beneath this raised garden live the poor of the city, those who are skilled and loyal enough to be trusted to work in the gardens or in maintaining the irrigation-works as well as those who work in the primary districts in menial roles. These ponies get to glimpse the sun during their daily tasks before returning to their lives in the eternal shadow of their sub-district.

By far the vast majority of the ponies of Karst live in the Tertiary districts however. The tertiary districts lie beneath the city itself, in it's endless tunnels and vast subterranean workings. This labyrinthine undercity is practically a city in and of itself, living at subsistence levels in the dank night-time world beneath the stark wonder of Karst. The ponies of the undercity are policed by Maud's templars just as those above, but where the ponies of the surface city can expect the Templar's to be harsh but essentially even-handed, the ponies of the undercity are valued so poorly that they can expect no such thing. Corruption and vice run rampant in the under-city, the only unquestionable rule being that you never cross the Templars, who carouse and exploit their position of unrivalled power safely out of the watchful eye of their Queen. It's not so much that they can get away with it because Maud doesn't know about their abuses in the undercity, it's simply that Queen Maud does not value the lives and the liberty of the throngs of ponykind wretched enough to call the hivelike undercity their home and so the Templars are permitted their excesses as long as they do their duty in the world above.

The ponies of the undercity are not all slaves, but in the undercity the distinction between free pony and chattel is blurred and indistinct. Many of both toil in the mines, or work to shore up and maintain the many miles of tunnel. Hundreds work each day in the mills, turning the great wheels that provide the power necessary to pump the water up from the depths into the water-garden and to power the irrigation system itself. They work in the hope of impressing the overseers with their reliability and their hard-working virtue sufficiently to be deemed worthy of joining the working-poor of the secondary district and earning themselves lives of relative comfort and safety. The largely unregulated nature of the undercity means that it has grown without oversight however, and it has over the centuries developed many of it's own distinct cultures and districts. For the right price, it's said you can get an Underpony to do anything, no matter how vile or degrading the task.

Spoiler: Trixie.odt

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Trixie – Trixopalousa

At the other end of the verdent sweep of the Flower Forest the trees begin slowly to thin and give way to cracked earth and open cast mines filled with toiling slaves. The city of Trixopalousa sits at the heart of an enormous crater, it's squared off and fiercely regular architecture starkly in opposition to the torn up landscape that surrounds it. Dark stone gives way to glossy black shards of obsidian, glittering from beneath boulders or inside the many huge cracks that spiderweb across the roughly level plane of the inside of the crater-wall. It is believed that a mountain once stood where the crater and the city now stand, torn down in a terrible sorcerous battle or mined to death by countless generations of slaves at the command of the Great and Powerful Queen Trixie. Whatever the case, only Trixopalousa stands there now and the mountains that shelter the Flower Forest have little to say about any lost sister.

The City is in truth little more than an elaborate fortress. To approach the city means crossing the ring of jagged rocks of the crater's edge and that's only possible in any numbers along the main road, worn treacherously smooth by the hooves of a thousand slaves a day. The city itself is surrounded by thick squat walls. Square towers rise periodically along the wall, which encloses the city in a perfect square. The angular buildings that take up the space inside are arranged in rigid blocks and rows, with wide empty roads and periodic open squares with elaborate statues glorifying the ruler in depictions of her many victories and triumphs. The statues sit above large, dry fountains and have never been filled in living memory.

The buildings inside the city, on these wide and regular roads house the upper echelons of Trixopalousa society, favoured families who have earned their way to prominence through dedicated military service and through providing the most conquered slaves as tribute to their queen. These large, heavily fortified buildings often enclose central courtyards and can be quite comfortable on the inside. From the outside, these buildings appear little more than glorified guard-postings. External windows are narrow and offer excellent views of anyone in the streets and the doors are both small and sturdily constructed. Any army that managed to breech the city walls would find those spacious streets turned into rivers of blood, carefully planned killing-fields to grind an attacking force to splinters in the hour of it's apparent victory.

At the center of the City stands a vast and oppulant pleasure-palace at the center of a series of fiercely defended fortifications. Here is where the city's glorious ruler dwells, surrounded by beauty and art. The pleasure-gardens in the palace grounds are carefully cultivated and maintained at some expense. They are littered with gaudy icons and statuary, all with the single theme of the glory and majesty of the Sorcerer Queen Trixie. What slaves and vassals as are permitted into this sacred space and into the presence of Trixie herself spend their lives desperately trying to assuage the violent paranoias and desperate self-aggrandisements of the city's self-styled immortal and invincible protector. They strive to baffle her with flattery and lull her into peacefullness through unending obeisance. When they fail, ponies die. Those within immediate reach are usually the first, denounced as being traitors and conspirators before the Queen gathers her guards and descends upon the subterrainian districts of her own fortress to violently surpress imagined uprisings.

Beneath the streets of the city lie a network of sewer tunnels, long empty of freely flowing water and adapted into dwellings for those who have not yet distinguished themselves in Trixopalousan society. Merchants and artisans, such as survive in the city tend to dwell here. They may earn the favour of the God-Queen briefly from time to time, but only the military families ever truly keep it for long as she values little so much as the spreading of her influence across the dead world and the swelling of her legion of cowering, broken-spirited slaves. These unfortunate creatures are forced to toil endlessly to provide Trixopalousa with the constant supply of Obsidian required to outfit her ravening armies. All done by hoof of course, as even the simplest wagons or wheeled aparatus are strictly prohibited on pain of death.

Those slaves that are required to labour in the city itself dwell beneath the sewers, in the half-finished tunnels and caverns that lie beneath in the dead roots of the lost mountain. The majority however must simply huddle together in the mines themselves, the lucky ones be able to count on a cave to protect them from Equestria's murderous weather but the rest must simply take their chances. Deaths are beyond frequent and desperation turns many a slave to cannibalism. Those strong willed enough or mad enough to bring themselves to do this are able to keep their strengths up far better than the rest. These ghoulish pragmatists are in turn the more likely to survive and over time gather power to themselves in the form of like minded ponies and slaves desperate for what little help is available to them from one who might just be able to give it.

Guards treat the slave-ponies with a feverish brutality. Better to be feared by the gathered hordes, given the rumours and the unnatural look in some of their eyes when they think they are unobserved.

Spoiler: Derpy.odt

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Derpy - Flowergarden

Nestled in the crook of a mountain range surrounded on every other side by blasted badland, there sits one of Equestria's few surviving forests. It is one of the only places where you can find something resembling the lost land of Equestria, but that isn't to say that the Flower Forest hasn't undergone changes since the world that was ended. It is as dangerous as it is verdent, filled with beauty and life and all the savagery and brutality that entails. Somewhere in the heart of this rare sanctuary lies the city of Flowergarden and home of the merciless sentinels that protect the fragile ecosystem of the forest.

Flowergarden is not a city in the traditional sense. It is not hewn from rock and stone, baked clay or elaborate structures of sawn and painted timber. It is made almost entirely from living materials, a series of mud huts and towering treehouses arranged into small, irregular villages all contained within the protective ring of the great briarpatch which surrounds Flowergarden like a wall would a more traditional city. The briars are thick and wild, their talon-like thorns making short-work of beasts and ponies unwise enough to attempt to cross it. It has grown tall and strong, it's roots watered by blood.

The city does not divide evenly into districts. However, a certain underlying structure always remains despite the organic shifting of the homes that make it up over generations. Those who are most favoured in society live towards the center of Flowergarden, clustering around the grand central temple tree and the Forest Goddess who resides within. Those who have dissapointed the Goddess or who have fallen in the eyes of society are forced furthest out from this hub to live in the hungry shadows of the Briar Wall. All others dwell somewhere in between, constantly vying for the approval of their beloved Goddess and the station that comes with it.

Worth in Flowergarden comes almost entirely in the context of approval from the city's God-Queen, Mother of the Forest and the Falling Rain. The Mother-Forest-Queen, or Mofeen is a Sorcerer Queen, one of the ancient and terrible defilers that rule so much of what remains of the world. But whilst it is not unusual for a Sorcerer Queen to claim divinity, Derpy is unique in that her subjects genuinely hold that belief. They shower their Mofeen with adulation and adoration, vying with each other for the unparalleled honour of her smile. She is their world, the one from whom all life springs and who guides them in their duties as protectors of this rare and spectacular forest.

Derpy doesn't rule so much as lead by example. She devotes herself to the protection of her forest, driving out loggers and hunters who might threaten either the trees themselves or the beasts and spirits that call them home. In turn, ponies who do the most to protect the forest or best enable the wider tribe to do so please the Mofeen most. This can be in the form of the careful and sustainable harvesting of produce to feed the tribe, or in the brutal retribution dealt out to those who threatened the trees.

What the Mofeen does not do is rule in any meaningful sense. Her approval and dissapointment function like holy decrees, but she does not directly make proclamations or issue edicts. Her city follows her out of love, not fear or mindless obedience. The city also polices itself to a degree. Those most favoured may eventually prove themselves thoroughly enough for the Mofeen to take them directly under her leafy-wing. Drawing away from the rest of society, these most trusted elite are taught powerful secrets and weild immense power in society, but almost always subtly and in the shadows. The Fillies of the Mofeen hold themselves apart from the rest of society, leading it on a local level by whispering advice in the correct ear, letting their collective will be known through rumour and inference.

Those who speak innapropriately or with insufficient adoration of the Mofeen earn the displeasure of the Fillies. Others who slack in their duties to the forest may also attract their baleful attention, as might those whose interests or loyalties do not lie with the city. Ponies unlucky enough to find themselves in this position can expect the Fillies to visit them in the night. Their deaths are swift and discrete and the forest makes full use of their mortal remains.

For her part, Derpy seems pretty genuine in her overriding devotion to preserving and even expanding the forest into the wasteland. There is no swifter way to earn the displeasure of the Mofeen and her Fillies than to be caught using Defiling magic, despite the fact that as a Sorcerer Queen she must surely be one of the most powerful Defilers that ever lived. Perhaps guilt for past deeds drives her to bring life back to a land that she helped slay. Perhaps she merely wishes to grow her following by earning the reverence of ponies across the wasteland under the guise of the life-bringing Mofeen. Perhaps she just really likes flowers. Who can say? Some few may suspect the truth who have gotten close enough to the forests enigmatic ruler, but it is not wise to discuss such things in Forestgarden. The trees have ears, and the owls are not what they seem.

Spoiler: Flim Flam.odt

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Flim Flam Brothers – The Free Cities.
All rights reserved.

The Free Cities lie in a region of blasted plains and dry dusty ground. Vast rubble-fields with well worn roads cutting clean paths through them, leading out across the wasteland to many far away places. It sits like a pair of spiders at the center of web carved into the rocky ground itself, the twin cities staring at each other across the empty banks of a great dead river. A single aqueduct of singularly enormous size stretches across the rocky badlands towards the cities from it's source in the far off mountains.

The twin cities sprawl in an ungainly mess on either side of the dead river. Constructed mainly from sandstone, both halves of the city have grown extensively over the centuries but without any guiding plan or principle beyond the limitations imposed by the geography and the limited resources available in the region. The buildings of the region are mostly sandstone, with smooth regular walls and flat roofs. Where wealth expands the options, neighborhoods become resplendant with vibrant paints, vast gaudy domes and spires and elaborate carvings and statuary. The one unifying feature is the ubiquitous network of aqueducts. They are spread throughout the two cities at various heights and angles all branching off the grand aqueduct that towers over all but the tallest towers of the Free Cities, some terminating in public spaces and others eventually making their way to large tanks beneath the more established districts. Without exception, the aqueducts stand dry and empty.

The network of aqueducts were once the wonder of the Free Cities. They provided a steady supply of a very rare resource, directly into the lives of those lucky enough to have established themselves in the trade-focused heart of the region. When they ran dry talk ran to rumours of sabotage and mismanagement. Distrust blossomed into blame and civil war came to the city. It was into this chaos that two strangers arrived. Each approached the elders of one half of the city seperately and offered their goods and services in support of the conflict. Metal weaponry and supplies of water, spices and slaves and art from across the wasteland made their way into the city as the strangers made deals and alliances. The bloody conflict of a city at war with itself continued for a generation, each stranger cheerfully facilitating the council of elders in their half of the twinned city, always ready with a carefully drafted contract.

There came a day when those involved paused to take stock of the cost of the bloody and senseless conflict, bury their dead and decide on what came next. The elders from both cities called a grand council and convened to talk truce. Peace came to the city with the cold realisation that while they were pre-occupied, the strangers had tied them up in inescapable bonds. Everything belonged to them now. Every brick and stone, every grain and every drop of blood. Sooner or later, one stranger or the other held anything you cared to name under an unbreakable contract.

Today, the city is still ruled in name by the Council of Elders, but all power in the Twin City rest with the two mysterious strangers who had been so happy to help. Flim resides in a vast palace on the west coast of the dead river and Flam in it's mirror image on the east side.

In the Free Cities, anything is possible for a price and everything is for sale. Money is truly power, and everything has a cost. Tithes and bribes and taxes and fees, nothing happens without cash changing hooves. Those smart or ruthless enough to play the system can climb quite high, gathering wealth and the power that comes with it to them and their family. Cross either of the Flim Flam brothers interests however and all your wealth and power can evaporate overnight. No laws get enforced, no crimes committed, no deals done without them taking a cut. In a city where wealth is power, the Flim Flam brothers are omnipotent and all that matters is that their endless lust for financial conquest be satiated.

The beating heart of the twin cities is trade. Merchant Houses do the majority of their business here in the city, under the watchful auspices of the Merchant's Guild which of course takes it's cut of all major transactions. Merchant Houses attempting to do business without going through the Flim Flam brothers and their Merchant's Guild find themselves undercut by their competitors, their goods stolen by bandits and their strongholds raided by mercenary armies. Consequently, the Free Cities see a constant stream of caravans travelling through them and a weary traveller can almost always find a bed for the night if he has the ability to pay for it. All the wonders of the wasteland flow through the twin cities sooner or later and it is said that you can find your very hearts desire in the many labrynthian bazaars but it will always cost you dearly.

Those who prove themselves unwilling or unable to pay their way in the city become property of the Flim Flam brothers. There is no trial, there is no hearing. There is no question of guilt or innocence. If you are unable to pay then you belong to them. You'll find yourself deep in their subterrainian debtors prison and you'll never see the sky again unless you reach an arrangement with them. Eventually, most inmates see sense and swear themselves into indentured servitude. Depending on your marketable skills and the size of your debt, your life after this point will either be brutal and brief of long and relatively comfortable. But be warned, everything has a cost in the Free Cities, even room and board in debtors prison. The longer it takes you to sign away your freedom, the smaller the chance of you ever earning it back. It is no surprise that the Flim Flam brothers chief resource is a supply of motivated but disposable labour with which to set to work as they see fit, whether mining salt or increasing the numbers of a mercenary troop.

Those few who earn the favour of one of the brothers are raised above the station of other citizens of the free city. These princes of the universe, these firey young upstarts are untouchable. They have by implication the wealth and protection of the brothers behind them and so they are free to indulge their every whim and impulse, no matter how morally repugnant or debauched. The only rule they must abide by at all costs is to never cost their lords and masters money. They have endless liberty across the city and dark powers at their command as well, so long as they are able to further bloat the coffers of the brothers.

To be at the other end of the scale in the Free Cities is to be less than cattle. You have no rights except those you can afford and though the wealth of the city will be built on your back, swelled by the sweat of your brow and the blood that you shed you will be looked down on with naked scorn by those who have been lucky or ruthless enough to stay a step above you on the ladder.

Spoiler: Luna.odt

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Luna – Palat Somni

The sands of the desert and the cracked earth of the badlands eventually give way altogether to the shifting pseudo-sea, the endless salty abyss that is the Sea of Silt. This treacherous mass looks like a desert of fine sand but swallows any foolish enough to enter it like the ghost of an ocean. Only by using dedicated craft, Silt-skimmers and the like can the Silt-Sea be crossed. The expanse is haunted by monsters fit to give even the hardiest wasteland surviver nightmares. Worms of impossible size, vast leviathans with cavernous maws fit to swallow the largest ships. Scuttling parasites that might at any moment swarm over the side of the hull and strip the crew to the bone. Spectral abominations that seep out from between the cracks and into the unguarded minds of unwary silt-sailors or fell creatures that would lure a silt-skimmer onto the rocks with songs of deathly beauty. If you brave all of this and venture out far enough you may find yourself hitting upon a chain of broken islands, scattered across the inhospitable sea. The shores bristle with vast, sun-bleached bones and the skyline is broken by the sand-drowning ruins of a long forgotten city. If the sandstorms that blight the region abate long enough for one to make landfall, an intrepid enough explorer might find themselves wandering the long dead streets of Palat Somni.

Wide open streets and tall buildings with smooth and gently slanted walls choke on the ever drifting sand dunes. Fleshless skeletons huddle in dark corners of the empty and abandoned buildings. Once it was home to a vast city teeming with life, bustling with busy ponies living their lives in service to their City's Sorcerer Queen, the ancient alicorn princess, Luna. The wind-scoured faces of the city's surviving buildings have long since abandoned all pretence of decoration, but elaborate engravings honouring the Princess of the Night still survive in some of the better sheltered interiors to tell the partial story of a city long lost to the wastes. Once, Palat Somni was a city without equal but today none remain, not even Princess Luna. Now only the Dead remain.

Those few to have heard the whispers of this far off place may share legends of a dark and terrible defiler and her shadowy minions, cast down in her hubris by those she thought were friends and allies. Grisly tales of a city put to death alongside it's Princess. For some, whispers of this long lost relic of the past are not intrigue enough. These insatiable scholars may exchange further tales of lost treasure, or terrible artifacts buried in the tomb-city of Palat Somni. Some few go further however, for there are whispers if you know where to listen that would tell you of a desperate plan and a cunning trick, of a powerful Sorceress fleeing her own dying body into the realm of dreams and of the depraved cultists that might have saught out this vengeful spirit, deep within the catacombs of Palat Somni, or deep inside their own unconscious minds. Perhaps they say, if one could only sleep deeply enough they could swear an oath to this terrible shadow and know true power.

Perhaps, they say, the shadow could be brought out into the world to pay back those that wronged it, and to wrap the burning world in the final comfort of an endless night. To drown the hateful sun and allow the faithful to escape the waking hell into a world of dreams. Or maybe they say that those foolish enough to chase after things in the night should pray that their quarry goes uncaught, in case something else wakes up with the sunrise, wearing your discarded flesh like a mask.

Some ponies would tell you that you should be careful what you might find when you close your eyes at night and that you shouldn't peer too closely at shapes half-glimpsed in a mirror.

Some might tell you to sleep tight. Sweet dreams, my little ponies.

So that's that, all there is, all there was and all there ever will be.

Make of it what you will.

WITNESSED! (Sorry, D&D: Mad Max attitude).

[Aotrs Commander]

So, despite my disappointment at the low quality of the DVD, I made a start on watchng W.i.t.c.h season 2.

And you know what? Five minutes in, I had more or less forgotten the quality issues¹; it really is enthralling. Once again, I am reminded why I classify this as one of the best western cartoons thus produced.

(Even despite the flaws - like the occasionally ludicrous curbs on violence; it would have benefitted from more latitude (e.g. Reboot, Justice League, Young Justice et al) to be a little more mature and serious in that regard (to amp the threats up a little), but some of that comes from being associated with Disney in the early 2000s, I fear. But it rises above those limitations anyway, with good characterisation and a good, well-executed myth-arc.



¹Bar the occasional excessively intrusive advertising bar from the TV airing from which my DVD is encoded - the folks that came up with and okay'd the idea that adverts for the next program should take up a quarter of the screen need to be taken out and disembowled with a blunt rusy spoon.

[Tiki Snakes]

WITNESSED! (Sorry, D&D: Mad Max attitude).

Ha! Sure. Something like that, I guess.

[DigoDragon]

Vertically Challenged Protagonist.

Spoiler

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First the gaudy repainted walls, and now they found black mold inside the walls. 2017 is off to an awesome start at the workplace.

[Topaz]

Looks like more preview news about Tails of Equestria has dropped; apparently the first supplement is going to be (not surprisingly) a Bestiary, including rules for non-pony PCs.

Book release is still targeted for mid-March; no indication of a PDF version.

[Madcrafter]

So that's that, all there is, all there was and all there ever will be.

Make of it what you will.

Saved! Who knows when such fragments of creativity might come in useful.


Also the first time I've posted in this edition of the thread I think. Hello folks. Still haven't watched the end of the last season, or the new movie. Would these things be worth doing?

[Thanqol]

Saved! Who knows when such fragments of creativity might come in useful.


Also the first time I've posted in this edition of the thread I think. Hello folks. Still haven't watched the end of the last season, or the new movie. Would these things be worth doing?

I haven't got around to EQG3 but the finale of S6 was actually really good and I wish the whole season had been like it.

[digiman619]

Saved! Who knows when such fragments of creativity might come in useful.


Also the first time I've posted in this edition of the thread I think. Hello folks. Still haven't watched the end of the last season, or the new movie. Would these things be worth doing?

Haven't seen the film, but I enjoyed the finale. If you like Discord, Trixie, Chrysalis being a great villain, or the idea that making friends with Spike is good for your career, I advocate watching it.

[b_jonas]

I haven't got around to EQG3 but the finale of S6 was actually really good and I wish the whole season had been like it.

But you know there's already four Equestria Girls movies, right? The third is Friendship Games, and the fourth is Legend of Everfree. And they're all totally worth watching. So much that people aren't sure whether Friendship Games or Rainbow Rocks is better.

[Thanqol]

But you know there's already four Equestria Girls movies, right? The third is Friendship Games, and the fourth is Legend of Everfree. And they're all totally worth watching. So much that people aren't sure whether Friendship Games or Rainbow Rocks is better.

Oh, right, I've seen 3 but not Legend of the Everfree.

And anyone who doesn't think that Rainbow Rocks is the best movie is obviously some sort of reptoid.